MORE FUNDING FOR ORGAN DONATION DATABASE

MORE FUNDING FOR ORGAN DONATION DATABASE

My dear friends, for several weeks now, I have been trying to contact the Philippine Network for Organ Sharing (PHILNOS) to find out how I could possibly help them. I tried contacting them via Facebook Messenger but all I can get are the same auto replies that keep telling me to send them an email or to call them. I keep sending them an email, but they also do not reply. I tried calling their landline, but I was told that nobody was around to answer me. I also sent them Viber messages, but they also do not reply. Having failed to contact them, I now worry that anyone needing an organ to transplant may not have a way to reach out to them in time.

According to Microsoft Copilot, the request for organs typically involves multiple parties:

1.   Doctors: Physicians identify the need for an organ transplant and initiate the referral process.

2.   Hospitals: Medical facilities coordinate with PHILNOS and manage the logistics of organ donation and transplantation.

3.   Family of the Patient: The patient's family plays a crucial role, especially in cases of deceased donors, as they provide consent for organ donation.

What that means is that any of those multiple parties could request for an organ, but before that could happen, PHILNOS must have a source of the organs, and that is how important a sourcing program is. What really happens is that there is a waiting list of patients who need organs, and the decision what organ to give to whom is strictly managed by PHILNOS. In that sense, a hotline, if it is made available, should only be accessible to doctors and hospitals, and not to the patients or their families. Perhaps the patients or their families could use email, text or Messenger instead, but we should help PHILNOS so that they will have more staff who could answer.

Perhaps due to budget constraints, PHILNOS is now a unit of the Philippine Organ Donation and Transplant Program (PODTP). In turn, the PODTP is a program under the Disease Prevention and Control Bureau (DPCD). The DPCB is also responsible for non-communicable diseases (NCDs). As a matter of fact, DPCB is practically the local equivalent of the American Center for Disease Control (CDC) and that should give you an idea of how busy and underfunded they are, not to mention understaffed.

I do not want to sound like an alarmist, but I believe that we should always be 100% ready already, if we are again hit by a pandemic like Covid, due to a virus of some kind. To be able to do that, we need to provide more funding to the DPCB, so that it could fully function like the CDC. Better still, we should just fund the PODTP separately, so that it could focus solely on managing the organ donation system through the PHILNOS. I am sure that our Congress will understand the importance of these suggestions, because these involves saving many lives. Your friend, IKE SENERES/11-25-24/visit my blog senseneres.blogspot.com

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