Saving lives; with organ & tissue transplantation

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.”