Ahmedabad: In order to clear the backlog, the Institute of Kidney Diseases & Research Centre (IKDRC) has decided to shorten waiting time for transplant surgeries by taking up two surgeries daily from next week.

Currently, there is a backlog of over 100 transplant surgeries that has piled up in last three months. The elective surgeries were discontinued due to imposition of nationwide lockdown in March this year.

“Under the new set of NOTTO guidelines which factors in Covid-19 precautionary tests for cadaver and live donors, we aim to achieve our monthly average of 30-40 transplant surgeries,” Dr Vineet Mishra, Director, IKDRC-ITS said in a statement on Thursday.

As per the plan, the institute has decided to admit the recipient patient a day before the surgery while admission of the live donor will be done on the day of surgery itself. The decrease in number of days for hospitalization will help the institute to engage manpower for increased number of transplant surgeries. Earlier the hospitalization of the recipient patient was minimum ten days which has been reduced to three days for post-operative care.

“The patient will be shifted closer to his home after ensuring facilities like physician visit, pathology labs and enhanced use of telemedicine for post-operative care,” explained Dr Mishra adding that this would help the institute to catch up on live donor transplant surgeries held in pre-covid days.

The institute has also reinforced its focus on cadaver donor programme under supervision of State Organ Tissue Transplant Organisation (SOTTO) with compulsory rtPCR test to ward off possibility of covid-19 infection. SOTTO, a state level organisation oversees allocation of organs harvested from cadaver donors to allocate it to recipient patients through a fair and transparent implementation of waiting list. With the help of a software the Human Lymphocyte Antigen (HLA) of a cadaver donor is matched with first six recipients in the waiting order and the final match of the best two are transplanted with the harvested kidneys.

Last week, IKDRC harvested four kidneys, two livers and one heart from two brain dead person from Surat and Rajkot, giving a fresh lease of life to seven people in one go.

However, cadaver organ donor rate in India is abysmally low at 0.05 per million population, in contrast to six per million in Greece, 22 per million in the US and 32 per million in Spain.