Last year, medics in Qatar successfully transplanted a kidney from a brain-deceased child to a 48-year-old patient.
Qatar’s Organ Donor Registry recorded 530,000 donors, making up 25 percent of the local adult population, Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) said on Thursday.
The figures shared by the public healthcare provider offered an overview of its organ donations programme, calling on the population to register to save more lives.
In 2023 alone, HMC registered 52 kidney donors, two liver donors, and 17 bone marrow donors.
A total of 22 deceased donors supported 42 organ transplant operations including 30 kidney, nine liver, and three lung transplants. HMC noted that a deceased organ donor can save up to eight lives.
Last year, medics in Qatar successfully transplanted a kidney from a brain-deceased child to a 48-year-old patient. The doctors had said that the child’s family offered to donate the kidney “immediately upon learning of the tragic news of his brain death” at Sidra Medicine.
Meanwhile, in 2022, Qatar performed at least 41 kidney transplants with a success rate of 100 percent, including 25 kidney transplants from living donors and 16 kidney transplants from deceased donors.
The local population can register to be organ donors at the Qatar Organ Donation Center in order to receive an official ‘donor card.’ The card acts as a form of identification to confirm to others that the individual, in the event of their life or death, is an organ donor.
The organ transplant programme in Qatar started in 1986, though it only carried out renal transplant operations and donations among the local community were low.
The country then opened the Qatar Center for Organ Transplantation in 2011, now ranking among the top in the world.
Qatar has since been expanding its organ donation programme to provide patients with critical conditions life-saving donations.
By November 2019, HMC set up a Heart and Lung Transplant Taskforce team, led by Professor Takahiro Oto, an internationally renowned expert in lung transplantation.
Then in 2021, Qatar carried out the first lung transplant procedure under Professor Oto’s supervision.
Doha’s health sector has witnessed constant development over the decades, with the country’s health care ranked among the top 20 countries in Numbeo’s 2024 indexes for the fourth consecutive year.
Since 2021, Qatar has been ranked among the top 20 countries in the Numbeo Healthcare Index by Country. Qatar was also ranked first in the Arab world and 18th worldwide in the 2022 Health Care Index.
Last year, five Qatari hospitals were ranked among the world’s top 250 academic medical centres, the highest number of hospitals from the region on the global ranking. The ranking was part of a new study by leading UK-based consultancy Brand Finance.
Four centres under HMC made it onto the list, including Rumailah Hospital, Hamad General Hospital, the National Center for Cancer Care and Research, and the Heart Hospital.
The fifth Doha-based entity that reached the global ranking is Sidra Medicine, which falls under the umbrella of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.
Qatar was elected as the president of the WHO Executive Board on 31 May 2023, in recognition of its ongoing support for the global entity’s efforts.
