THE Southern Philippines and Medical Center-Organ Transplant Services Unit has tied up with the University of Barcelona (UoB) to conduct trainings to help medical professionals in hospitals encourage families of brain dead patients to opt for organ donation.
SPMC Human Advocate and Retrieval Effort Organ Procurement Organization Zone 4 Maria Theresa Bad-ang in an interview said that the training will be about Transplant Procurement Management, which will be spearheaded by the UoB.
"It is a training given to all medical nurse, doctors, so that they will understand what is transplant management," said Bad-ang.
Bad-ang said this partnership was born out of the Sister Transplant Center program of the International Society of Nephrology and the Transplantation Society (ISN-TTS), which SPMC signed with University of Barcelona.
She said UoB has been guiding them to implement strategy to increase the number of patients resorting to kidney transplant.
"Many patents are on dialysis and so little are resorting to transplant," she said.
Bad-ang said in SPMC, there are 500 to 600 dialysis patients, and they have 100 new patients per month.
"In one year there are 1,200 and we only conduct 18 transplants, so there is a great disparity you have to merge, on how to treat the problem on why dialysis patients are increasing while transplant is available," she said.
She said the first thing they want to address is that people will not be afraid of dialysis, and they target to suggest transplant even before dialysis.
"Kung mag dialysis sila sasabihan na option na mag-transplant sila because 10 months in dialysis is equivalent to one transplant," she said.
She said that amount paid for transplant is now much lower through the Philhealth Z package, which reduced the P1.5 million amount to transplant to between P400,000 to P600,000.
In the center, according to Bad-ang, you can have it for as low as P200,000 to P600,000.
She said since sourcing kidneys is usually from brain dead patients, they are encountering problems in asking consent from the families of patients.
"Brain dead is dead, legally is dead, patay na talaga siya, kami mga doctor may tinatawag kami na Glasglow Neuro Scale. Fifteen is highest gising tayo, 3 is braindead, 8 coma pwede pang mabuhay pag mag 3 ka na in three days’ time, within 72 hours so mamatay ka na so sayang ang organs na sana i-donate," she said.
Based on statistics shown, Bad-ang cited that Philippine is ranked 1 percent percent on organ donation all over the world, Spain ranked 43 percent, the country wherein they are now getting new strategies for the transplant management.