The Georgetown Public Hospital in collaboration with a visiting medical faculty will soon conduct a number of corneal transplants.
Public Health Minister Dr George Norton said the hospital is currently assessing the patients who will benefit from the surgeries. He did not name the visiting medical team.
Corneal transplants become necessary when a person’s corneas no longer allow light to enter the eye accurately because of scarring or disease. During the transplant, a procedure called a keratoplasty, a portion of the cornea is removed and replaced with a new section from a tissue donor.
Norton stated that the tissues would be donated by the visiting medical team. However, he said the ministry hopes to soon stop depending on overseas sources for donor tissues. He noted that these tissues were very expensive.
The minister said too that note has been taken of the number of bodies in the hospital’s morgue with excellent corneas, which could be used as potential tissue. This is the routine procedure and in many countries appeals for tissue and organ donation see persons making such decisions while alive so that relatives do not have to deal with it after they die. In the case of corneas, tissues are removed and stored in an eye bank.
Norton said passing legislation which would help hospitals retrieve tissue from dead bodies would be difficult since most family members would not approve of it. He noted that while there are persons who might choose to donate parts of their bodies for the improvement of science, in most cases, after they die relatives still disapprove.
He said the conception of an eye bank would only thrive if the relatives of potential donors would cooperate with the hospitals.
Norton said Guyana has surgeons who are more than capable of performing the surgeries but a proper tissue donation policy would be needed along with an eye bank. “It’s not like it is something we cannot do in Guyana. It is not rocket science,” he said.
Ophthalmologist Dr Neeraj Jain had also voiced the need for the creation of an eye bank in Guyana. He said from the eye bank register at the Dr Balwant Singh’s Hospital, it is clear that a lot of patients were in need of a new corneas and the numbers were much larger at the Georgetown Public Hospital.
Jain had made mention of the hospital’s plan to set up its own eye bank in Guyana but he stated that the biggest barrier was that there was no proper legislation in place for organ donation. He said if Guyana continues to depend on overseas sources for the tissue donation, it would remain on the “no priority” list for the donor countries.
Norton was the first ophthalmologist to perform a cornea transplant in Guyana four years ago at the Georgetown Public Hospital. The hospital had performed five transplants. Last year, several such transplants were performed by Jain.
In 2014, Norton saw an average of 300 patients per month with eye diseases.
“We want to revive it at the Georgetown Public Hospital,” Norton told Stabroek News.
