Draft rules ready for kidney transplants

THE DRAFT GUIDELINES ARE POSTED FOR SUGGESTIONS TILL JANUARY 16, 2016, ON WEBSITE — WWW.NOTTO.NIC.IN

NEW DELHI: If you have donated a kidney or a part of your liver in the past and are now in need of a kidney for transplant, you will get priority under the government’s draft guidelines for allocation criteria for deceased donor kidney transplant.

The health ministry on Friday released an eight-point draft guidelines for allocation of kidney from a deceased donor to a person suffering from end stage renal disease in need of a transplant. The draft guidelines are posted for suggestions till January 16, 2016, on its National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation website — www.notto.nic.in.

In the draft, the government has proposed a scoring system for making priority. There are eight categories, of which maximum points (5 points) will be assigned to a person who has been a previous living donor and now requires kidney transplant.

A person whose kidney transplant failed previously owing to the body rejecting the organ, will also be given priority over others. Other criteria include dialysis period and age of the recipient. There is an elaborate online registration process and the hospital where the transplant is expected to take place will have to online register the patient. includes, age up to 65 years, end stage renal disease on maintenance dialysis for more than three months on regular basis, and should not have advanced untreatable heart disease, irreversible stroke, inoperable cancer or untreatable major psychiatric illness.

A kidney advisory committee will approve registration and urgency criteria, if any. The committee will also confirm need of renal transplant of every newly registered patient. Once approved by the committee, only then the patient will be put on an active list in the system where the scoring will be done to priorities.

While about 60,000 kidney transplants annually are needed to be performed, due to organ shortage the country manages only about 4,000 in a year. Health minister JP Nadda said, “This initiative reflects our commitment to promote organ donation. We will finalise these guidelines after we receive suggestions. Once finalised, these guidelines will go a long way in promoting