Opinions & Interviews

MINSK, 23 March (BelTA) – With the commissioning of the new center of transplantation, the time people spend on the waiting list for organ transplants will be reduced, Oleg Rummo, the head of the National Research Center for Organ and Tissue Transplantation, said in an interview with the ONT TV channel on 23 March, BelTA has learned.

Today the waiting list for organ transplants in Belarus is one of the shortest in Europe. The waiting time for a liver transplant is five to six months at most. The waiting time for a kidney transplant is one year (one of the shortest not only in Europe but also in the world), for a heart transplant from six to nine months. The construction of the new transplantation center will further shorten the waiting time. With the new center, the sector will be able to develop more effectively in the next 20 to 30 years, and to implement more new technologies.

Earlier, President Alexander Lukashenko ordered relevant authorities to consider the feasibility of building a new center for organ and tissue transplantation as he visited the National Research Center for Organ and Tissue Transplantation which operates at City Clinical Hospital No. 9 in Minsk.

According to Oleg Rummo, this decision was not spontaneous. It was taken based on a detailed analysis of the progress in the Belarusian transplantation in the past few years. Belarusian doctors learned to use expensive and very sophisticated technology. The center which is based at Hospital No. 9 is too small to accommodate all patients and to perform a big number of transplantations.

It is too early to talk about the location of the new center. “We are now working on two options. Next to our center there is quite a lot of space that can be used to build a large advanced surgery building for approximately 200 bed space. This project will cost approximately $50-55 million,” Oleg Rummo said. He noted that most likely the project will be financed by the state, and added that this will be the money well spent.