Country to lure more organ donors
Vietnam should come up with an
effective awareness strategy to increase understanding of all aspects of
organ donation in order to have more people become donors, experts say.
According to the Health Ministry, nearly 300 organ
transplants are performed each year in the country while around 500,000
people nationwide need transplants of various kinds.
Dr Tran Ngoc Sinh of the Cho Ray Hospital in HCM City said
that Vietnam had around 6,000 patients suffering from chronic kidney
failure, and 300,000 blinded by diseases relating to the cornea.
However, the very small number of organ donors made it difficult to
provide these people with life-saving or life-enhancing transplants, he
said.
A recent survey on organ donation conducted
among 2,000 people in Vietnam showed that more than 50 percent of
people did not want to become donors.
Thirty-five
percent agreed to become donors after their death and only 15 percent
said they would donate whenever other people needed their help.
Religious beliefs and low awareness were main reasons for many people not wanting to become organ donors, Sinh said.
The first kidney transplant was successfully conducted in Vietnam in
1992 and 12 years later, local doctors performed the first liver graft
surgery.
Early this month, doctors at the Hue
Central Hospital in Thua Thien-Hue Province successfully
performed a heart transplant, the first such operation performed solely
by Vietnamese doctors.
The previous successful heart transplant was performed last year in Hanoi with the assistance of Taiwanese surgeons.
As of last November, 17 patients had received kidney transplants, 15
had undergone liver transplants and one patient had a heart transplant
with organs taken from brain dead donors.
Vietnam
passed a law relating to organ donation in 2006, under which
Vietnamese citizens aged 18 and above have the right to donate their
tissue or organs.
The law offers several incentives
for donors including free health care services, health insurance and
priority for transplants if needed. This year, the Ministry of Health is
set to issue five more decrees involving organ transplant. It will also
set up a national organ transplant association and a co-ordination
centre.
Prof Nghiem Dao Dai, former head of
Allegheny General Hospital 's Organ Transplant Ward in the US , said
in a workshop held earlier that the shortage of organ donors was not a
situation particular to Vietnam .
Dai stressed
the need for organ transplants to be a very fair and transparent process
in order to remove the notion that it was a treatment that served only
the rich people.
Prof Francis L Delmonico, chairman
of the Transplantation Society in Canada and an expert with the World
Health Organisation, emphasised the importance of setting up a network
of organ donors and having transparent regulations on brain dead
diagnoses to avoid patients becoming victims of organ trafficking.
He also called for legal protection to ensure that people would not end up dead after agreeing to become organ donor./.