Centre asks hospitals to disclose post-organ transplant survival data

The Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry has asked the State governments to direct registered organ transplant hospitals to reveal post-transplant survival data and publish the same on their respective websites.

The data are being collected for the first time in such a scale to reveal the success rate of transplant surgeries, especially kidney, lung and heart transplants, and lifespan of those who have received the organs. The results are expected to enable patients requiring transplants to take a decision or make a choice. The hospitals are told to strictly adhere to informed consent requirements and ensure that all relevant information regarding transplant procedures, risks, and outcomes is adequately disclosed to patients and their families. 

In a note to the Health Secretaries of the States and Union Territories, the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO), which functions under the Directorate-General of Health Services, referred to a letter written by Dakshina Kannada MP Brijesh Chowta on the need to enhance transparency and accountability of kidney transplantation outcomes.

The MP had emphasised the need for tracking long-term transplant outcomes, including graft survival, complications, and mortality, as well as disclosure of post-transplant survival data by hospitals and strict adherence to informed consent and patient communication protocols.

NOTTO maintains the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Registry, which includes data of kidney donors and recipients. Its Director, Anil Kumar, said in the note that regular and comprehensive reporting of post-transplant data would strengthen monitoring of transplant outcomes, improve traceability, and support evidence-based policy decisions.

Display on websites

Registered transplant hospitals across the country were told to display the crucial data on the home page of their respective websites. The process was part of the initiatives to strengthen transparency, accountability, and outcome monitoring in organ transplantation nationwide. Asked for his views, a senior transplant surgeon in Chennai said crude mortality rates had very limited informational value for individual patients wanting to make a choice of hospitals. “Until risk-stratified mortality outcomes that have been duly scrutinised in an unbiased manner are available both from government and private hospitals, it will be near impossible to make informed choices,” he said.

The data hospitals have been told to publish — number of patients alive after six months, one year, three years and five years — will be difficult to collate as there is no mechanism for such a follow-up, he said. “Deaths post-transplant happen due to a variety of reasons such as age, co-morbidities and other risk factors. Even if post-survival data are shared by hospitals, it will be challenging to authenticate the veracity of the claims,” he said.