The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) has expressed concern over some States not compiling living and deceased donors’ data, which were essential to monitor the implementation of the organ transplantation programme and prevent commercial dealings in organs.
In an advisory to all States recently, the MoHFW noted the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO), established under the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act (THOTA), 1994, was an apex organisation to provide for an efficient and organised system of organ procurement and distribution in the country, and maintain a national registry of donors and recipients of organs and tissues, sources in the Transplant Authority of Tamil Nadu said.
No system in place
To fulfil the mandate, the hospitals carrying out organ and tissue transplantation/ retrieval/tissue banking were required to link with NOTTO and provide both living and deceased organ and tissue donation and transplantation data for the National Registry. However, it was observed that data, especially living donor data, were either incomplete or not provided by the States. Also, some States did not have a system for collecting living donor data.
The Ministry asked State Health Secretaries to instruct all licensed or registered transplant hospital (Organ Transplant, Non-Transplant Retrieval Centres, and Tissue Banks) to get linked up with the NOTTO web portal. Every transplanting hospital needed to register patients requiring transplants in the ‘subject demography format’ as available on the NOTTO web portal and update their status on regular basis.
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The advisory said that to maintain the National Registry, it was essential that the data were updated online on a regular basis and monthly offline report related to deceased as well as living donors was required to be compiled, verified and provided to NOTTO through the proper channel.
The State Appropriate Authority (SAA), which had powers of a civil court under the Act, was told to ensure the compliance to provision of data by the hospitals for the National Registry. Non-compliance to the instructions should be dealt with by the authorities under the provisions of the THOTA, 1994.
‘Absolutely essential’
Elaborating on the importance of deceased and living donors, the MoHFW said a robust National Registry was “absolutely essential for better programme implementation and monitoring with the objective to prevent possible commercial dealings in organs and also to promote deceased organ donation,” the sources quoted the advisory as saying.
It was also desirable that every transplant hospital, whether public or private, promoted deceased organ donation and made efforts to achieve a minimum number of donations annually for which they would be required to establish a system for brain stem death certification and its monitoring, and facility for deceased organ donor maintenance.
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The advisory comes after NOTTO issued a series of instructions to curb allegations of organs harvested from brain dead patients being transplanted on foreign nationals, overlooking deserving Indian patients on waitlist.
Going by national data, 16,041 organs were transplanted in 2022, most of which were kidneys and livers, harvested from live and cadaver donors. Delhi topped the list with 3,818 organ transplants followed by Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, which stood at 2,245 and 1,525 respectively, the sources added.
