A new agreement was signed this Monday morning in the city of Córdoba. The Municipal Emergency Hospital will be part of a pilot test aimed at promoting organ donation. A specific service will be created with agents destined to encourage the activity that has already been developed for decades, with funds from the National Central Single Coordinating Institute of Ablation and Implantation (Incucai).
Carlos Soratti, president of the institute, explained to The voice that there will be five national hospitals that will carry out the “Procurar” program. In addition to the ER, the Perrando, in Chaco, and three third-level health centers in Buenos Aires (Posadas and those in the Merlo and Malvinas Argentinas districts) will be added to this proposal.
For the Incucai, Argentina has high levels of survival after transplants
It will be complemented by the “Córdoba Procura” Program, differing in two aspects: “The national plan contemplates an organizational unit. National law establishes that it is a service with trained personnel. In addition, the costs that the donation process generates in the hospital will be recovered directly through Incucai”, explained Soratti.
The agreement implies that the generation and search for donors are part of the institutional objectives of the hospitals that are incorporated. Depending on the complexity, a specific program and an organizational unit must be created (which can be a section or a new service, if it does not already exist).
A head of that organizational unit should be appointed and future planning established to increase procurement capacity. The process of communication with the families and the extraction of the organs are the responsibility of the health center, with the supervision of the provincial organisms (in this case, the Ecodaic), which will continue to coordinate the waiting lists.
“All the processes that require activities outside the hospitals will be borne by the provincial organizations. The allocation of the organs, the distributions and the contact with the different transplant teams”, clarified Soratti.
The official highlighted the task that the Emergency Department has been carrying out since the eighties to promote organ donation activity.
Health: organ donations in Córdoba increased 44% in 2022
Balance
At the request of The voice, Soratti made an assessment of organ donation in recent years. In this sense, he explained that in 2019 a record was recorded in the activity, after the Presumptive Donor Law was sanctioned (everyone who dies is considered a donor unless they have explicitly left their refusal in writing).
In the pandemic, activity fell by half due to the restrictions and the affectation of most services. In 2021, it began to rebound and last year it closed with 4,000 organ and corneal transplants in the country. “In 2022 we had a number of donors equivalent to those achieved in the months before the pandemic. That made us very happy,” the official concluded.