Govt’s GB Pant Hospital to soon start cardiac transplants

Twenty-two-year-old Rahul Kumar Prajapati still remembers the day doctors told him that he would need a heart transplant. After a brain stroke left a side of his body paralysed, he laid in the intensive care unit at AIIMS for months. His condition remained critical, with his heartbeat dropping to 13-14 beats per minute at a point.

The doctors had warned him that finding a donor could take anywhere between six months and three years, especially because he had the rare O-negative blood group. However in 2018, just 19 days after he was listed, he received a matching heart. “I was 22 and the donor was 21. I was told these things, but I never met his family. I will think about him all my life,” he says.

Rahul was among the speakers at GB Pant Hospital’s second organ donation awareness session held on Saturday. The programme brought together doctors, nurses, medical students and counsellors, with experts from the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO) and the Organ India Foundation outlining the gaps and possibilities in India’s transplant ecosystem.

The hospital is already an organ retrieval and transplant centre and has conducted liver transplants in the past. But preparing for heart transplantation marks a significant expansion for a Delhi Government hospital.

Dr Shiny Suman Pradhan, joint director at NOTTO, said systemic challenges continued to hold back India’s deceased organ donation rates despite the enormous patient burden.

“Hospitals struggle with identifying and certifying brain stem death, which is essential for deceased donation. Many lack trained transplant coordinators and grief counsellors,” she said. Only about 15-20 per cent of transplant facilities in India, she added, were in the government sector, limiting access for poorer patients.

Attitudes towards donation, gender disparities in access to transplants, gaps in data reporting and logistical hurdles such as transport and donor maintenance also remain major obstacles. Delhi has around 50 hospitals with transplant facilities, but except for two or three, all are private, she noted.

“We need stronger systems for deceased donor care, uniform declaration of death, better reporting and a more equitable transplant landscape.”

NOTTO, which operates under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, was set up in 2014 as India’s central authority for organ procurement, allocation and registry management. Before its creation, the country lacked an integrated national system for organ donation.

Alongside NOTTO’s mandate, India’s transplant framework is governed by the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, enacted in 1994 and amended in 2011, which defines brain death, regulates retrieval and transplantation, and lays down safeguards for donors and recipients.

Dr Muhammad Abid Geelani, medical director at GB Pant Hospital, said building public awareness and trust was key for government hospitals.

“Organ donation is not just a medical procedure but the highest form of humanitarian service,” he said, adding that the hospital’s transplant coordinators had begun expanding counselling for families and strengthening protocols so that when cardiac transplants started, retrieval and allocation could take place smoothly.

Organ India Foundation CEO Sunayana Singh said stories like that of Rahul showed “what timely donation could do for a life that almost ended — and for the family that received another chance”.