Physical Health South Africa Project #52957

Saving lives; with organ & tissue transplantation

by South African Tissue Bank Association

Project Report | May 3, 2023
Final Report

By Ansie Sevenster | Project Leader

A brief summary of the project's activities and the deactivation reason.

My goal was to do fundraising and assist to create & run a call centre / operational support centre to coordinate organ & tissue for transplant in South Africa.

This project was run under the auspices of the nonprofit South African Tissue Bank Association (SATiBA). Please refer to their website: http://www.satiba.org.za for a description of the work they do.

In a wider sense my goal was to:

1 - raise funds via crowdfunding on the GlobalGiving (GG) website.

2 - raise funds via donations in South Africa.

3 - create and run a call centre / operational support centre as first point of contact to coordinate and communicate the possible availability of organs and / or tissue for donation in South Africa.

What is the problem:

There are people dying waiting for organs and tissue. The referral process to harvest organs and or tissue is not well known and therefore not consistently used throughout the country.

This project was created because the reality is that there are various groups and people doing sterling work in this field, but in islands of excellence whereas together so much more could be gained. Most of this work is done by nonprofit organisations and funding is needed.

The result and the way forward summarised:

1 - To raise funds via crowdfunding on the GlobalGiving (GG) website. The total amount of donations raised was $5 395, of which $10 was driven by GG. My expectation of reaching a wider audience was therefore not served.

2 - To raise funds via donations in South Africa a SARS section 18A certificate is needed. One of the disadvantages of GG is that individuals and companies in South Africa could not get a tax benefit from these donations.

To obtain a SARS section 18A certificate, SATiBA would have to :

Change the name of the organisation, change the constitution and Memorandum of Understanding (MOI) and the subscription via membership fees will have to be stopped. SATiBA decided not to do this.

3 - To create and run a call centre / operational support centre as first point of contact to coordinate and communicate the possible availability of organs and / or tissue for donation in South Africa.

The team defining what we were going to do and how we were going to go about it, consisted of 3 persons, including myself. One of the other members of the team have taken a new appointment across Groote Schuur Hospital and Red Cross as head of transplant and will be using this to explore the province supporting a call centre and embedding it in their systems. He is having discussions with Emergency Medical Services. Hopefully that makes the effort not dependent on ongoing fundraising for the call centre.

Permalink

Mar 27, 2023
SATS and SATiBA Congress

By Ansie Sevenster | Project Leader

The 29th SATS (Southern African Transplantation Society) and 6th SATiBA (South African Tissue Bank Association) Congress - The 3-day event was held from 11-13 November 2022 at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS), Stellenbosch, Cape Town, South Africa.

Among all the interesting and informative presentations there was a fruitful round table discussion on cornea donation in Africa. Some of the insights gained were:

What you can do to get donor notifications:
Mandatory death notification policy at national level will increase donor volumes.
Challenge: changing national policy takes many years and is very difficult to achieve.
In the meantime...
•start thinking about getting the mandatory death notification: establish relationships at
the trauma center, mortuary, medical examiners office etc.
•involve the hospital management and treating doctors – awareness work starts at the
hospital because even the medical staff lack sufficient knowledge.
•create a mechanism where you receive timely notification one or two hours after death:
maybe with someone who is working on that 8 or 10 hours a day, calling hospital staff on a
regular basis.
•be as independent of other people as possible in getting your information.
•be proactive, do not wait for phone calls or registrations.
•influence the people right at the top at political level.

If you want to develop a strong donation program, you need to have high level
support–whether that’s from a government hospital CEO, someone from the
ministry of health, someone who motivates the employees at the lower levels to
make timely death notifications. To support donation, get the police
commissioners to support donation. Someone needs to be going to push things
forward.
If you are working at the management level of the government or hospital or even
of the police department, there is so much risk and so much concern within
donation, that people don’t make this decision or don’t make these types of
decisions, because they are always afraid of what their senior is going
to do about that.
People at the top, at the ministry of health level, the head of the police forces,
they are willing to support with education. We send them to other countries to
learn and to see those donation programs in real in first-hand. But you have to
start at the top.”

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Nov 28, 2022
Current status quo - moving forward

By Ansie Sevenster | Project Leader

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