Qatar’s pioneering Organ Donor Registry has marked a major milestone with more than 100,000 registered donors in the country.
An education and outreach campaign during Ramadan and throughout the year has seen the number of registered organ donors in Qatar more than double in 2015 from 43,000 in March to more than 100,000 and counting today.
This year the Qatar Organ Donation Center continued its successful campaign to enroll new donors, taking its message to 12 shopping malls across the country as well to as to other major events and schools. Hamad Medical Corporation’s (HMC) Managing Director Hanan Al Kuwari PhD said the milestone was a remarkable achievement for the internationally recognized program.
“Reaching 100,000 registered donors was achieved through the great efforts of the Qatar Organ Donation Center (Hiba) and its supporters in the community,” said Dr. Al Kuwari, who is herself a registered organ donor.
“We especially owe a great deal of gratitude to Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser for her unwavering support for our program. Through her generous act of registering as an organ donor, Her Highness made a clear and unequivocal pledge to support organ donation and her demonstration of leadership by example helped tremendously in encouraging more people in Qatar to register as organ donors.”
“Central to HMC’s efforts to expand the program and encourage registrations is our commitment to education - about the benefits of organ donation and the process. This means people in the community can make an informed decision to give the gift of life.”
An organ transplant can be life-saving. It can also significantly improve quality of life for someone with chronic organ failure. The life-saving organs come from deceased donors, who pledged during their lives to give their organs. A deceased organ donor can save up to eight lives. It is also possible to donate a kidney or part of the liver while one is alive, to a relative.
Dr. Al Kuwari said Qatar’s organ donation and transplantation program’s success was built on the strict implementation of the Doha Donation Accord which ensures ethical standards and equitable treatment for donors and recipients.
"There has been a significant drop in the number of patients going abroad for transplantation procedures, which is a great encouragement for us to further enhance our services to achieve our goal of self-sufficiency in terms of organ donation and transplantation,” Dr. Al Kuwari said.
“The growth of the registry is unprecedented in the region. Qatar is one of the few countries in the region offering integrated organ transplantation services and on the basis of a single unified national waiting list,” she added.
“We are immensely proud of the program and the great strides made by its team in a relatively short space of time and we will continue to build on this success,” Dr. Al Kuwari said.
For more information about how to register as an organ donor go to
www.hamad.qa