The Maharashtra government on Saturday issued a government resolution setting up a 16-member committee headed by State Health Minister Deepak Sawant to finalise a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for organ transplants under the Human Organs Transplant Act, 1994.
The decision was taken in a meeting between Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Dr. Sawant, in the wake of the kidney transplant racket unearthed at Dr. LH Hiranandani Hospital in Mumbai. Five doctors, including the hospital’s Chief Executive Officer Dr. Sujit Chatterjee, were arrested in connection with the racket.
According to the government resolution (GR), the committee will be headed by Dr. Sawant with the Minister of State for Public Health and Family Welfare as a special invitee. The Principal Secretary, Public Health and Family Welfare, Director of State Health Services, Director of Medical Education and Research, and Additional Commissioner (crime) of Mumbai police will be its principal members.
Other members will include Dr. Avinash Supe, Dean of KEM Hospital, Dr. Sujata Patwardhan, head of Urology at KEM Hospital, gynaecologist Dr. Rekha Davar from Grant Medical College, urologist and president of Indian Society of Organ Transplantation Dr. Umesh Oza, nephrologist Dr. Ashok Kripalani, and Dr. Shrirang Bichu from Bombay Hospital. Advocate Uday Warunjikar, Hinduja Hospital Chief Executive Officer Gautam Khanna, a representative from Fortis Hospital, and Deputy Director of the human organs transplantation section of the state health services will also be part of the 16-member committee.
The committee will also lay down the SOP to create an online database of organ donors and for verification of documents. The police investigations in the kidney racket showed that donors were made to pose as relatives of the patients. The process to verify whether the donors were indeed relatives of the patients was found to be poor.
The 16-member committee will also have the mandate to formulate a policy framework to facilitate the creation of green corridors to transport organs for transplants. It will also make recommendations to the government to make the organ transplantation process swifter. Since August 2015, there has been a sharp increase in organ transplantation surgeries and in instances of traffic police creating green corridors to transport live organs from a dead patient in other cities to Mumbai hospitals.
The committee will also make suggestions to provide medical assistance to the families of brain dead patients, according to the GR.
