[ 2012-05-14 ]

Kidney transplant at Korle-Bu
Doctors at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH)
will begin undertaking kidney transplantation in
the last quarter of this year.

This will bring great relief to many kidney
patients in the country who need kidney transplant
but cannot afford the high cost of travelling and
transplantation abroad.

Since 2008, the nation’s premier hospital has
undertaken 12 kidney transplants with the
assistance of a team of transplant surgeons from
Birmingham in the United Kingdom and the
Transplant Links Community.

Three of those transplants were performed in April
this year.

The Birmingham team is expected to perform another
batch of transplants in October this year, after
which the Ghanaian team will take over.

Meanwhile, Korle-Bu has sponsored the training of
a consultant urologist, Dr Bernard Morton, as a
transplant surgeon to lead a local team to bring
hope to many kidney patients.

Currently, the Dialysis Unit at Korle-Bu, which
used to operate three times a week, now runs
24-hour, seven-day-a-week service because of the
increasing number of chronic patients.

An excited Chief Executive Officer of the
hospital, Professor Nii Otu Nartey, in an
interview with graphic.com.gh, said Korle-Bu would
endeavour to provide the logistics and facilities
to ensure a smooth take-off and sustenance of
kidney transplantation by the Ghanaian team.

Throwing more light on the preparation, Dr Morton
said the hospital had come a long way since 2008
after the first transplant.

He said the initial idea was for the local team to
start the transplants after a period of assistance
from the Birmingham team, but there had been a lot
of ups and downs.

He expressed appreciation to the CEO of the
hospital for standing firm and providing all the
encouragement and support for the national project
to be realised.

He said the team would continue with the usual
living donor practice where a living person would
agree to donate one of his or her kidneys to a
recipient.

Dr Morton was hopeful that with time, the country
would come up with an elaborate legal framework to
support the cadaveric donations.

Cadaveric donation is where the kidney of a
brain-dead person but whose heart continues to
beat is harvested and given out to someone who
needs a kidney transplant.

He said what the hospital needed was a complete
centre, either as part of the Urological Centre or
a separate transplant unit, which could be
expanded to a tissue transplant centre.

Asked about the availability of the requisite
human resource, Dr Morton said, “We have
demonstrated that we can do it after the first
transplant in 2008.”

He said the team of local personnel had continued
to be around and actively taken part in the other
transplantations and said the only new development
was his training as a transplant surgeon.

Dr Morton was hopeful that with time, a complete
centre like the National Cardio-Thoracic Centre,
the Burns and Plastic Surgery Centre would be set
up.

For her part, Dr Osafo, who is the Head of the
Dialysis Unit of Korle-Bu, said the local renal
team had built the needed experience to support
kidney transplant locally.

She said besides the transplant, some of the
nephrologists at the unit were considering
developing a peritoneal dialysis programme, a form
of self-administered dialysis, to help ease the
pressure on the dialysis machines.

She expressed worry over the alarming rate at
which people in their productive ages of between
20 and 50 years were developing kidney problems in
Ghana.

Dr Osafo said the University of Ghana Medical
School, in collaboration with other centres in
Africa and the USA, had applied for a grant from
the National Institute of Health (NIH) to study
the genetic causes of kidney disease in Africa.

The outcome of that important application, she
said, should be known later this year.

If successful, then patients with kidney disease
would be studied at the Korle-Bu Teaching
Hospital.

Source - Daily Graphic

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