The distances are huge, but sometimes, the time taken to cover them has dramatically shrunk. Since 2012, when the Chennai city traffic police began organising ‘green corridors’ to transport organs from one hospital to another, their experience has grown, as has the speed with which organs are delivered to save lives.
On September 3, for instance, the police transported a heart that had come in from Bangalore, from Chennai airport to Fortis Malar hospital in Adyar, in seven minutes, after passing 19 traffic lights over 14 kilometres. This year alone, 15 such corridors have been created by the police, to transport organs.
For doctors, green corridors have been an immense boon. “When I first started transplants in 2006-07, we had to get donors from within the hospital or bring them to the hospital to harvest organs in order to do it as fast as possible. But with the corridors, it is now possible to do inter-hospital and inter-city transplants too. This has helped increase the pool of donors and the number of transplants performed. The traffic police have been very helpful,” says Paul Ramesh, senior consultant cardiothoracic and transplant surgeon, Apollo Hospitals.
The crucial aspect while transporting organs is to minimise ischemic time – the time an organ spends outside the body. If this is minimised, complications are minimised, says Dr. Ramesh. This is where the green corridors play a vital role. For the traffic police now, a system is in place. “Two officers are deployed as soon as a hospital contacts the control room. The movement of the ambulance is continually monitored until it reaches its destination. All traffic signals are turned ‘green’ ahead of time and one passage is cleared for the ambulance. The ambulance is led by a pilot vehicle, to ensure smooth transportation,” says S. Sivanandam, deputy commissioner for traffic (planning).
