Doctor overseeing Spain’s organ donor system trains UAE healthcare staff

A doctor recommends the UAE adopt a similar organ donation system as that in Spain

ABU DHABI // A doctor who oversees the world’s most successful organ donor system said the UAE would face challenges when it introduces "transplant champions" next month.

Dr Marti Manyalich, president of the Donation and Transplant Institute (DTI) in Spain, has trained the teams that will personally ask the families of intensive-care patients if they would consider allowing their relative to become a donor. They would do so after the patient is declared dead and a test shows that the person is a viable donor.

If the family of a deceased patient agrees, the organs would quickly be extracted and given to those on a waiting list.

The UAE intends to follow many countries in having a donor registry, which would allow members of the public to agree to donate their organs after death.

But Spain’s success is linked to the personal approach system – and five Abu Dhabi hospitals will introduce the same next month. "One hundred per cent of the time you approach families. The big difference is that the organ donation system in Spain is at the hospital level, not outside the hospital," he said.

"Healthcare professionals who know all the information about the procedure approach the family. They explain what the situation is and the families feel very comfortable. As a result, they accept the donation request 85 per cent of the time."

Dr Manyalich said medical professionals in Spain followed a hospital-based system in which doctors were responsible for organising the organ donation procedure when a potential donor was available.

"It is part of the healthcare system, while in the United States, for example, it is an independent organisation – an organ procurement organisation – and they are outside the hospital," he said.

"In our system, we call it a procurement unit and it is inside the hospital."

Having medical staff involved at every stage of the process had been credited with a high success rate, said Dr Manyalich. "The model in the US has about 25 donors per million of the population. Countries with the highest rates of donors – such as Spain, Portugal, Croatia – do not have such a donor registry," he said.

Spain has 43 donors per million people, the latest estimate shows. Each year, there are as many as 12,000 people on waiting lists for organ transplants. Half of them will receive a transplant.

"The possibility of being transplanted in Spain is high because the proportion of donors has been the highest in the world for the past 25 years," said Dr Manyalich.

He added that the UAE was following the best path for success, but said organ donations could be held up if no family members were in the country to give permission.

In the UAE, locating expatriate patients’ next of kin to secure their consent would be a challenge because hospitals would have to find a way to quickly do so, said Dr Manyalich.

Next month, a team from the institute will be providing further training to hospital staff in Abu Dhabi.​