The Royal Hospital on Sunday launched an electronic educational application, ‘Your Bestowal is a Life’ for organ transplantation. The application explains the mechanism of expressing interest to donate organs in the Sultanate of Oman.
Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed al Saeedi, Minister of Health, launched the application in the presence of health personnel and media representatives.
While explaining mechanisms of organ donation, the application also highlights the harms and consequences of trading in human organs, corrects misconceptions about donation after death, and confirms the conditions for organ donation by relatives.
The idea behind the app is to provide all possible medical information concerning the transplantation of kidneys and liver, answer frequent inquiries related to special groups such as children, adolescents, pregnant women and lactating mothers. The application also gives a lot of information to make a correct decision about organ transplantation.
Dr Ahmed al Saeedi said the electronic educational application about organ transplantation is the first of its kind app in the Arab world and will contribute to addressing rumours and errors related to organ transplantation.
“It is necessary to create awareness about organ transplant in the community, noting that organs donated by a brain-dead person can save lives of eight people and that some organs, including liver and kidney, can be donated during the life of a person,” he said.
Al Saeedi mentioned, “In the Sultanate of Oman, more than 3,000 people suffer from kidney failure and undergo continuous dialysis, which is very tiring from a psychological and health point of view.” He stressed that liver and kidney transplantation in Oman is one of the successful operations, calling on citizens and residents to view the application and benefit from it.
“The main factor for the lack of organ transplants in the Sultanate of Oman is the lack of organ donors,” he said, noting that the Royal Hospital has started performing kidney transplants since 1988. The programme is continuing and developing.
According to MoH, on October 24 last year, the first successful liver transplant was performed on a five-year-old child at the Royal Hospital.
However, in January this year 2022, the transplant team at the Royal Hospital performed four kidney transplants on patients with chronic kidney failure; two of them were children and two adults. The procedures were done within a week.
Until the beginning of March, 17 kidney transplants have been carried out from brain-dead donors at the Royal Hospital and Sultan Qaboos University Hospital, 300 kidneys have been donated to patients from living relatives, and 13 for liver transplants from living donors in the Sultanate of Oman so far, Dr Neven al Kalbani, Head of Organ Transplant Department at Royal Hospital and vice-president of Omani Association for Organ Transplantation, said in an earlier statement.
Organ transplantation is a rapidly growing field in the country and all over the world. Its importance stems from the fact that it gives patients who suffer from chronic insufficiency in the functions of some active organs such as the kidneys and liver a much better quality of life.
Setting up the Omani Association for Organ Transplantation on June 23, 2021, is a major development in the field of organ transplants in the country. It comes under the umbrella of the Omani Medical Association, headed by Dr Ahmed al Saeedi and consisting of 73 members.
Officials expect that a national centre for organ transplantation will be established, similar to many countries that have made great strides in this field. These centres work to manage the organ transplant programme in all respects to obtain human organs legitimately by encouraging community members to donate organs during life and after death, being the only source of human organs.
