Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and Health Minister V.S. Sivakumar will dedicate the State government’s first-ever deceased donor liver transplant facility in public sector at the Government Medical College Hospital here on Wednesday.
The new facilities which are being inaugurated — specialised medical equipment costing Rs.3.5 crore, a most-modern transplant intensive care unit set up at Rs.27 lakh, liver transplant drugs kits costing Rs.11 lakh and the first Cross match and Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA) lab in the public sector in the State readied at Rs.70 lakh — will ensure that patients who undergo liver transplants at MCH get the most-modern treatment and care.
Liver transplant surgeries cost anywhere from Rs.20 lakh to 30 lakh or upwards in the private sector. The government hopes to offer the same procedure at much lower and affordable cost to the public. At present, only deceased donor liver transplants will be taken up in the government sector.
Currently, only four patients have registered for liver transplant at MCH.
The procedure could be offered as soon as a suitable and viable cadaveric liver was available, the MCH authorities said.
Complex procedure
Liver transplants, unlike kidney transplants, were very complex procedures and required elaborate infrastructure facilities before a transplant programme could be launched. MCH was able to acquire all facilities and ready itself for the transplant programme in a space of one year and eight months, they added.
The HLA lab for performing tissue matching and antibody production tests, a crucial pre-requisite before most organ transplants, is the first such facility in the government sector in South India.
