Training workshop: ‘Organ donors are life savers’

Religious scholars, media urged to promote organ donation.

LAHORE:

Donating an organ is a great sacrifice that can give a new life to dying patients, said Post Graduate Medical Institute and Ameeruddin Medical College Principal Prof Anjum Habib Vohra.

Addressing a workshop for nurses who assist in transplant operations and in the recovery of donors, Prof Vohra said that doctors, religious scholars, media and social organisations should try to educate the public about the importance of organ donation and promote it. The Shaikh Zayed Hospital administration has taken a commendable initiative by issuing donor cards, he said.

The workshop was attended by nurses from Lahore General Hospital, Shaikh Zayed Hospital and the Punjab Institute of Cardiology Prof of Neurosurgery Dr Khalid Mahmood of LGH and Shaikh Zayed Hospital transplant experts Prof Tariq Ali Bungish, Dr Amir Latif and Dr Aezaz Ahmed delivered lectures.

Prof Bungish said that organs could be donated by living persons or after death. Post-mortem donation was not possible without the permission of the family of the donor. He said that the National Assembly had passed a bill making transplants legal in 2010. “Islam gives great importance to saving lives and a number of religious scholars from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran have given fatwas permitting organ donation,” he said. However, the sale and purchase of human organs is illegal, he added.

Prof Mahmood said in his lecture that doctors and nurses must provide the best possible healthcare to the donor, as losing a lifesaver to medical complications would be tragedy.

Dr Latif and Dr Ahmed said thousands of people in Europe, America and Islamic countries received organs every year. The organs of people close to death were transplanted only when all efforts to save them had failed. Most of the organs came from patients who were on ventilators after a road accident, they said.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 4^th, 2013.