Emergency heart transplant - Creating a green corridor

Heart Transplant isn't that easy:

In this crucial medical procedure,the healthy heart should be retrieved from someone who is brain-dead and has been kept on life-support. The donor has to be exactly matched to the recipient’s tissue type to minimize the risk of foreign organ rejection.To find such a donor heart in the recipient’s vicinity or even somewhere near his town is not at all a cakewalk. A terminally ill patient on a life support with his/her heart beating normally may be found to be eligible and willing donor in some cases, the only problem being the distance between the donor and the recipient could be very far. In such cases the donated heart has to be transported to the recipient’s location within the quickest possible timeline. The donor’s ischemic time, roughly measured from the moment of clamping & removing the heart from the donor’s body to the moment of the release of the artery clamp at recipient’s site is considered safe below 4 hours only.These are termed as long distance or trans-frontier organ transfer.

Recent Trans-frontier Heart Transfers in Mumbai:

Since August 2015, the Indian healthcare newsstands have been flooded with three heart transplant updates – all of them being long-distance heart transfers. Chennai is known to be the first Indian city to create express green corridor (GC) for a heart transplant. However, two of the cases were operated in Mumbai. The first case where the recipient was a 22-year-old cardiomyopathy patient, received the heart of a 42-year-old female, a Pune resident, who was declared brain dead owing to brain aneurysm. The 45-minutes odd stretch from the Pune Hospital to Pune Airport were brought down to 7 minutes with help of 25 expert cops, while 150 police personnel manned the 20 km high traffic stretch to help transport the harvested heart from Mumbai airport to the destination in just 18 minutes. In a similar instance the Mumbai and Navi Mumbai traffic departments arranged a green corridor to make way for another such trans-frontier heart transfer. The traffic units of  Vashi, APMC, Mahape, Rabale, and Mulund coordinated well by escorting the ambulance with jeeps and motorcycles to curtail the 45-minute journey to a mere 15 minutes. The active heart of 63-year-old was transplanted in a 29 year old patient.

The earliest incident among the three was the most interesting case of all long-distance organ transfers as apart from the heart, 5 more organs were harvested from the 57-year-old brain dead patient, transported, and successfully transplanted to six patients. This took place between two major super specialty hospitals in New Delhi located 20 km apart from each other. The coordinated efforts of Delhi Traffic Police brought down the stretch to a mere 16-minute drive.

What is a Green Corridor?

A green corridor, in terms of road traffic, is known as a coordinated & quickly organized traffic corridor for the safe and fast passage of an ambulance conveying some emergency medical help for a critical patient.The swiftly organized setup ensures roads carefully cleared of vehicular traffic and the medical aid reaches the patient at an expedited manner.

More campaigns need to be organized in the cities for sensitizing people and creating awareness for making way for the ambulance. In emergencies, expedited transport can be materialized by traffic green corridors.