Leading medic calls for national transplant office

IT IS “critically important” for the Health Service Executive to establish a national transplant office to co-ordinate an effective transplant strategy, one of the State’s foremost transplant physicians has said.

Prof Jim Egan was speaking at a ceremony in Dublin yesterday to mark 25 years of heart transplant operations in Ireland.

Many recipients of heart transplants attended along with members of the team at the Mater hospital involved in operations.

Prof Egan said the continuing reduction in organ donations, due to the decline in the number of people dying in road accidents, “emphasises the point that it is critically important that the HSE provides a transplantation office to co-ordinate and effective transplantation policy in the country”.

Tributes were paid to the late Maurice Neligan, who, with Prof Freddie Wood, performed the first transplant in September 1985. Prof Wood said Ireland had a reasonably good rate of organ donation, the sixth highest in the European Union, but said it was important this be maintained and even improved.

“Hopefully a national office will improve donor donation. It is important to indicate your wishes to donate to your family. To donate is a wonderful example of love for humankind.”

The first recipient of a heart transplant was Eddie Kelly, who died three months after the operation. His widow was at yesterday’s event, hosted by the Irish Heart and Lung Transplant Association.

The fourth recipient of a heart was Andy Kelly (42), from Dublin, who was 18 when he received his new heart.“No one really knew how long I’d live. It was early days. I didn’t know what to expect.”

He has gone on to marry and have children and is still in contact with the mother of the 19-year-old man whose heart he received. “He was killed by a drunk driver when he was walking home from a disco. Yes, awful. I have a close relationship still with his mother. She was at my wedding and I’d visit her,” he said.