In a bid to promote organ donation to all its staff, patients and visitors, Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital has covered a pair of its lift doors with messages urging people to sign up to be an organ donor. The idea is that the eye-catching bright pink lift wraps get people thinking about organ donation as they wait for the lift.
The message is particularly relevant to children and young people: nationally there are currently 148 children under the age of 18 waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant. 11 of these patients live in the North West, of whom 5 are waiting for a liver transplant, 5 in the Manchester transplant unit are waiting for a kidney transplant, and one child is waiting for a heart transplant. Children and young people can be organ and tissue donors too.
Without donation there can be no transplantation.
Another set of lift doors in Manchester Royal Infirmary carries a similar message in a bid to get people thinking about joining the organ donation register while waiting for the lift. Hopefully, they will go on to register which, in turn, will lead to more people getting the transplants they need.
“Thanks to the fantastic support from medical and nursing staff in our Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, we are able to discuss organ donation with families as part of end of life care. Since April last year, the courageous and brave decisions parents have made to donate their children’s organs have saved the lives of seven people and many more lives have been enhanced through tissue donation,” said Lumnije Mustafa, Specialist Nurse – Organ Donation.
“On behalf of the recipients and their families, we would like to thank everyone involved in supporting organ donation and helping to save the lives of others. We are especially grateful and thankful for the selflessness of the donors and donor families who said “yes” to organ donation and gifted life to others in the midst of their loss.”
Manchester is the UK’s largest kidney transplant centre, performing 277 adult and 17 paediatric kidney transplants from 1st April 2015 to 31st March 2017. These kidney transplants were performed at Manchester Royal Infirmary and Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital respectively.
Organ donation saves lives and one organ donor can save or transform up to nine lives and even more by donating tissue as well. For more information about organ donation and how to sign up to the organ donation register, go to www.organdonation.nhs.uk or call 0300 123 23 23.
Anyone can register on the organ donation register. Age isn’t a barrier to being an organ or tissue donor and neither are most medical conditions. People in their 70s and 80s have become donors and saved many lives. There are currently around 10,000 people in the UK in need of an organ transplant. This figure changes constantly as people join and leave the transplant list. Three people a day across the UK die before they get the organ they need – that’s over 1,000 people every year.
Photo caption: Lumnije Mustafa (R), Specialist Nurse for Organ Donation at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital and Manchester Royal Infirmary, Dr Kay Hawkins (C),
National Clinical Lead for Paediatric Organ Donation, Clinical Lead for Organ Donation and Consultant in Paediatric Intensive Care, Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, and Dympna Ebah (L), MFT Governance Lead.