Too few organ donations are a big problem in our country. – Let’s look at the statistics. At the end of last year, more than 1.7 thousand people were waiting for a transplant in Poland. Meanwhile, there were just over 500 donors, including more than 360 actual donors, or those from whom at least one organ was successfully retrieved. The disproportion is therefore huge and continuous education is needed - said Marshall Adam Struzik.
From this need, the idea of the "Give Life" campaign was born. Its aim is to educate about donation and transplantation in Mazovia Region. The campaign will run from 2022 to 2023. It includes numerous trainings for medical staff, as well as didactic classes on transplantology with students from eight post-secondary medical schools.
During a conference inaugurating the campaign, Professor Maciej Kosieradzki, Head of the Department of General and Transplantation Surgery at the UCC MUW, President of the Polish Transplant Medicine Association, coordinator of the team for implementation of the "Partnership for Transplantation in Mazovian Voivodeship" program, gave a speech. Our expert pointed out that despite numerous successes and the fact that we are able to safely perform transplants in increasingly difficult cases, their number remains virtually constant. Meanwhile, the needs are growing. - When asked why there are so few organ donations in Poland, the most common answer is that people don't agree to donate. However, the number of objections in the Central Register of Objections is not growing... Unfortunately, the problem often lies in the fact that neither during studies nor after entering the workforce do we acquire the soft skills to communicate with the patient's family or the seriously ill. That's why this program is aimed primarily at neurologists, neurosurgeons, and anesthesiologists to provide them with these skills so that they can practice difficult conversations in a safe environment with actors and a psychologist. Not necessarily directly related to donation, but also how to inform the family of a dying person or a deceased person that their loved one is dying or has died and we are going to donate organs and get authorization for such donation. We would like to tell a little bit about transplantation also to the middle and lower level staff in hospitals. Radiological criteria for diagnosing brain death have changed, which all technicians and radiologists may not know about. Hence the idea of a short training with the help of a voivodeship consultant - said Professor Kosieradzki.
Also professor Slawomir Nazarewski, voivodeship consultant for transplantation medicine, head of the Chair and Department of General, Vascular and Transplantation Surgery at UCC MUW, emphasized disproportionate number of retrievals in relation to people waiting for transplantation.
Let’s look at kidney transplants. Nationwide, 900-1100 kidneys are transplanted annually and that's all. Therefore, any campaign that carries information to the public about the need for organs from deceased people as well as the possibility of organ procurement from living donors in terms of kidneys or liver lobe is needed and desirable. There are 55 hospitals in Mazovia Region with so-called donation potential. Out of this number, over the last few years, 20 to 30 institutions has been active in transplantation - said prof. Nazarewski.
Whereas professor Roman Danielewicz from the Department of General and Transplantation Surgery, UCC MUW, the chairman of the National Transplantation Council, emphasized that for years we have been facing the problem, similarly to hospitals all over the world, of insufficient number of organs taken for transplantation from deceased persons. In Poland, 95 percent of transplanted kidneys come from deceased donors, while only 5 percent come from living donors. At the same time, as far as the number of organ donations is concerned, we are still below the so-called European average; in Poland, the number of deceased donors is about 13 per million inhabitants. Unfortunately, in the Mazovian Voivodship this number is even lower and for many years it has not been possible to mobilize hospitals to register potential deceased donors, and those that are already doing so, to take full advantage of what we call donation potential. It is about maximizing the possibility of taking organs from deceased donors - explained prof. Danielewicz.
In turn, Artur Kamiński, MD, PhD, from the Department of Transplantology and Central Tissue Bank of the Medical University of Warsaw, and the Polish Transplant Coordinating Center Poltransplant, indicated that currently in the Mazovia Region we are facing two problems. The first is that for several years the number of donations has been falling in comparison with other regions. For which the solution could be, for example, living donation, which in some countries accounts for 30, 40 or even 50 percent of all organ transplants. The second problem Artur Kaminski, MD, PhD, discussed was the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which significantly reduced transplantation options. - Although another wave of infections lies ahead, rebuilding the transplant system should already have begun. Based on statistics, we see that during the pandemic period, the number of reported donors decreased by about 20 to 30 percent per year - the expert stressed.