Lungs taken from a donor at the Regional Hospital in Kielce were given to a recipient in Hamburg. The first historic procurement, with the participation of a foreign transplant team, took place in Kielce a few days ago.
Swietokrzyskie: Lungs taken from a deceased donor saved the life of a patient from Hamburg
Published May 25, 2023 11:18
fot. Mariusz Kondrak, WSzZ Kielce
According to Jacek Bicki, M.D., head of the Department of General, Oncological and Endocrine Surgery at the PTSC in Kielce, this was a multi-organ donation. In addition to the lungs, kidneys and a liver were also taken from the donor and transplanted in Poland.
- Since no lung recipient with the right blood type was found in our country, the donor woman was reported by Poltransplant to Eurotransplant," explains Wieslawa Saladra, who coordinated the procurement.
Doctors from Hamburg eventually flew in for the lungs, the transplant coordinator adds.
Organ harvesting also took place at the Regional Hospital in Kielce last week. The heart was transported to Wroclaw by a police Black Hawk. The team of the Wroclaw center thus performed the 100th transplant of this organ. Kidneys were also collected and transplanted from a male donor.
This year, 5 organ donations have already taken place at the Regional Hospital. This would not have been possible had it not been for the fact that the donors did not object during their lifetime. The donations were accepted by the families of the deceased.
Thanks to these donations, many lives have been saved. In Kielce Comprehensive Hospital alone, 11 kidney transplants have already been performed since the beginning of this year.
- There is a clear involvement of treatment teams in the process of recognizing brain death, hence the increased number of retrievals and transplants," concludes Dr. Jacek Bicki.
According to data from the Supreme Audit Office, in 2016-2020, a total of nearly 8,000 organs were harvested from deceased donors in Poland, and more than 7,300 organs were transplanted. The largest number of total organs harvested (from deceased and living donors) were kidneys and liver. The outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 had a negative impact on the results of the various areas of organ transplant activity. In the first year of the outbreak (March 2020 to February 2021), compared to the last year before the outbreak (March 2019 to February 2020), the number of hospitals reporting the possibility of organ donation decreased by 13 percent, and thus the number of donors decreased by 26 percent. As a result, in the first year of the epidemic, the number of all organ donations decreased by nearly 20 percent.
Elaborated. on the basis of: WSZZ Kielce, NIK
