HÀ NỘI — Hà Nội’s Việt Đức Hospital recently received organ and tissue donations from four patients in the span of just one month, hospital director Trần Bình Giang said.

This was a record in Việt Nam in terms of donations tallied within one month, Giang told online newspaper vietnamplus.vn.

“Previously, the hospital would wait for years for 1 or 2 cases of organ donation,” Giang said. “This time, however, 4 patients donated 16 organs in only one month.”

“This is a good sign that Vietnamese people are becoming more open to the idea of organ donation,” he said.

While Việt Đức Hospital records 4 to 6 cases of brain death due to traffic accidents every day, there have been only 40 organ donations made in the last decade.

The community now views organ donation as a humane act that helps save other people’s lives, he said.

The four brain-dead patients donated 8 kidneys, 4 livers, and 4 hearts.

The donated organs were transplanted onto 14 patients in Việt Đức Hospital and 2 others in Huế General Hospital.

At present, two-thirds of the patients who received the organs were in stable condition and have already been discharged from the hospitals.

Associate Professor Nguyễn Quang Nghĩa, director of hospital’s organ transplantation centre, told vietnamplus.vn that 3 out of the 4 patients who received the donated livers went through a hepatic coma.

“The patients suffered liver failure in the last stage, which has a high risk of fatality,” Nghĩa said. “However, the patients are now in stable condition.”

So far, Việt Đức Hospital has performed transplant procedures for 590 kidney failure patients, 53 liver failure patients, and 19 heart failure patients.

The first kidney transplant was performed in Việt Nam in 1992, while a liver transplant was first carried out in 2004. A heart transplantation was successfully performed for the first time in 2010, and a lung transplant from a live donor was first carried out in 2017, while it was only this year that a pair of lungs were successfully transplanted from a brain-dead person. — VNS