Organ donation down by third as transplant staff diverted to Covid
ORGAN donations are down by almost a third in two years as transplant staff were diverted to Covid19 efforts in Ireland.
And, after two years on a waiting list for a kidney transplant, one patient has been told she could be waiting another five years.
‘It is very, very disheartening. I’ve already been on dialysis for two years and it does take up a lot of my time,’ Jillian McNulty, 44, told the Irish Daily Mail.
She added: ‘It’s three days a week in Dublin and that’s two to three hours from me. On a Friday, you’re talking about a four-hour journey home with the traffic. It’s very degrading.’
Ms McNulty, who is from Longford town, will be the first person with cystic fibrosis in Ireland to have a kidney transplant with her own non-transplanted lungs. She said the drop in kidney transplants by 21.3% since 2019 is ‘really scary’ because ‘there are so many people waiting for kidneys’.
Ms McNulty was first put on a
‘Lagging behind rest of the world’
waiting list for a kidney transplant on December 20, 2019, when she was told there could be a five-year wait. But the day after, she fell ill and was put in a coma. She was too sick to be re-listed and was only added again in April 2021, when she was told she would have to wait up to another five years.
Now she fears the drop in organ transplants – which is said to be due to transplant staff being diverted to Covid efforts – will impact her current situation.
‘I know it’s Covid and nobody can control it, but at the same time it’s scary when you’re on dialysis. I’m being literally kept alive by a machine and I desperately want my kidney,’ she said. Ms McNulty, who has drafted a letter to Taoiseach Micheál Martin calling for action, added: ‘I know everyone has suffered with Covid here, but we’re lagging behind the rest of the world with organ donations and transplants. The Government really needs to start saving lives because lives are going to be lost. They need to wake up.’
Ireland’s ranking for organ donation and transplants fell last year to 18th among the EU countries, compared with 14th in 2019.
The Irish Donor Network (IDN) is calling on the Government to undertake measures to improve donation and transplantation, including a plan to bring us into the top ten EU countries for it.
It is also calling for the Government to increase investment in facilities and staffing and enact the Human Tissue Bill, as promised, to introduce soft opt-out organ donation.
There was a 32.1% decline in solid organ transplantation in Ireland in 2020, compared with 2019, and a 27.1% decline in deceased organ donations. Lung transplants were down 58.2%, heart transplants dropped 42% and liver transports fell 44.9%.
Philip Watt, chairman of the IDN and CEO of Cystic Fibrosis Ireland, said our ‘major reduction’ in ranking in the EU ‘in the space of one year’ is a ‘key concern’.
He said it shows that ‘transplant services in Ireland were hit even harder than other EU countries as a result of Covid-19’.
Thomas Henry, 33, who had a double lung transport in 2013, said staff being diverted to Covid efforts would have ‘angered him a hell of a lot’. He was waiting seven weeks and one day when he received his transplant, and he has known people who died after being on the waiting list for a long time.
Mr Henry, from Newbridge, Co. Kildare, said that before his transplant he couldn’t sleep at night. He said: ‘I couldn’t get excited about things because all I would think is I’m going to die in three months. Then when I got my transplant, it was like winning the lottery.’
Mr Watt, of the IDN, said the figures for how many people are on waiting list ‘mask’ how many people actually need a transplant, as it’s likely the number of assessments also ‘decreased significantly’ during the same period.
A spokesperson for the Mater Hospital, which holds the National Centre for Heart and Lung Transplants, said it is unable to give ‘precise numbers of redeployments from the transplant centre’ to Covid efforts, due to ‘the need to constantly adapt’. It said: ‘All services in the transplant centre are now operating at an appropriate level to care for our patients.’