“This year we have very favourable results”, Araújo said, adding “Portugal has one of the most advanced transplant programmes in the world on an international level and has one of the highest rates of donors per every one million inhabitants.”
The state secretary was speaking at a ceremony held to mark the public unveiling of a protocol between the São João Hospital Group, the Portuguese Institute for Blood and Transplantations, and the National Institute for Medical Emergencies, which aims to boost organ harvesting from donors in cardiac arrest.
The pilot project has been successfully tested in the units belonging to the São João Group as well as hospitals in Vila Nova de Gaia, Matosinhos and the Porto/Santo António group, which have special VMER medical resuscitation vehicles available to transport patients to São João.
In cases of irreversible cardiac arrest, the São João group tested equipment that pumps and oxygenates blood outside the body, to preserve the victim’s abdominal organs, namely the liver and kidneys. Under the new protocol, cardiac arrest victims are ventilated and transported to hospital while the heart beat is massaged and set by a mechanical cardiac compressor.
At São João the patient’s blood flow is passed through a circuit and a membrane which increases the probability of the heart’s function recovering and, if possible, preserving the organs for transplantation, explained São João clinical director José Artur Paiva.
At that unit, working with VMER teams, the organs from six donors in cardiac arrest have been successfully harvested.
Deputy State Secretary for Health, Fernando Araújo said it is “expected that this year is one of the best to date in terms of national transplants.”
“Nevertheless we want to foster and expand this area” and, therefore, “the idea is to extend this project to Lisbon and then to Coimbra. We want to use this experience to also take lessons from, reflect upon, then implement it in other regions of the country”, Fernando Araujo concluded.