Doctor transplanting hope to millions
Pakistani surgeon offers free dialysis and organ transplants at institute
KARACHI: Camped on the baking concrete outside a gleaming transplant centre, the city’s sick have come from miles around in desperate hope for a last chance at life.
There, Dr Adibul Rizvi, a urological surgeon, provides free medical care to hundreds of thousands of people each year, providing a much-needed alternative to Pakistan’s public health sector, which critics dismiss as chaotic, corrupt and vastly under-resourced.
Dr Rizvi, with a thatch of white hair as springy as his step, roams the crowded halls of his life’s work every day from 8am until midnight or later, visiting the bedsides of patients – children, criminals, VIPs alike.
At 79, he is fuelled by love of his job; his enthusiasm evident as he recounts his 42-year odyssey from starting with an eight-bed ward to building one of the largest treatment networks in South Asia.
The achievement cannot be understated.
His Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT) is funded largely by charitable donations, some as small as 100 rupee (RM4) at a time, and has treated millions of people over the last four decades.
More than 300 transplants and 260,000 dialysis sessions were carried out in 2015 alone, with follow-up treatments and medications provided for as long as it takes – all entirely for free.
“Governments in a developing country ... they cannot afford a stateof-the-art health service,” says Dr Rizvi, describing the unimaginable poverty that staff in some of his 10 health centres across the country encounter.
The government does give money, its funding accounts for some 30% of SIUT’s budget, but not enough to fulfil Dr Rizvi’s philosophy that “every human being ... has got a right to access healthcare, to live with dignity”.
The solution? Dr Rizvi, inspired by Britain’s National Health Service, “went to everyone, and we made them partner”.
But when SIUT was founded in 1974, convincing Pakistanis to donate their hard-earned money for such a mission in the conservative Muslim country was a challenge.
While the giving of zakat, or charity, is one of the five pillars of Islam, many believed organ donation went against syariah, or Islamic law. No organs; no transplants. To break the impasse, Dr Rizvi had to get the clerics on his side.
“Luckily they all agreed ... that organ donation is quite Islamic and should be done,” he says – though with the caveats that all heirs must agree to the donation, and that a Muslim’s organs could not be transplanted into the body of a non-Muslim.
Even so, a lack of awareness in Pakistan about the value of organ donation is “pushing back our progress”, Dr Rizvi admits.
Pakistanis who enter SIUT’s main centre here are taken aback by its spotlessness and efficiency, traits virtually absent in many of the country’s other hospitals.
In a bright paediatric ward, the young patients receive dialysis, resting on white sheets set off by skyblue walls painted with cheerful murals. Roaming the ward is medical social worker Sanober Ambreen, who describes her job as keeping the patients “calm and cool” throughout the uncomfortable procedure with music classes, paintings, even talent quests.
Bustling through the hospital, Dr Rizvi insists he has achieved nothing yet, and vows to take on no less an enemy than cancer itself next, calling it “doable”.
He brushes off any suggestion of retirement.
“My colleagues, they are working (the) same way. Most of them have become hypertensive, I have not,” he laughs. — AFP