Curaçao kidneys to be
sent to the Netherlands
WILLEMSTAD--The Kidney Foundation in Curaçao is changing course. The foundation will no longer occupy itself with daily work like the transport of patients to the several dialysis centres on the island, but more with education and other matters that would ultimately result in better care.
Effective January 1, the Kidney Foundation disposed of the transportation department and started a new donor project. Most probably it will be possible that within a few days, donor kidneys can be transported from Curaçao to the Euro-transplant in the Netherlands to be transplanted in patients.
The actual start of the project is just waiting for a last test of the entire protocol.
Until now, kidney patients have been travelling from the Antilles to the Netherlands to receive a donor kidney in the Medical Centre of Amsterdam, which is located relatively close to Schiphol. This is because transplants always must be done very quickly.
To date, the Antilles have not been donating kidneys for transplants. "Consider it giving something back," says Alex Roose of the Kidney Foundation, “even though the Netherlands has not pressed the foundation to do this.”
To donate organs for transplants, the surviving relatives of the deceased must give their approval. The kidneys of the dead person will be removed in St. Elisabeth Hospital and together with medical data like blood- type and tissue characterisation, flown in a cool box to the Euro-transplant International Foundation in Leiden.
Euro-transplant is responsible for the distribution of donor organs in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria and Slovenia. Euro-transplant does a few activities for all these countries, like waiting list registration, tissue characterisation, organising a 24-hour mediation office, collection of waiting list- and transplant data, and arranging the transport of organs.
The doctor in attendance or transplant hospitals register the patients who become eligible for organ transplants and the Dutch Transplant Foundation puts them on the waiting list and forwards the information to the Euro-transplant; this institution puts the patients on the international waiting list.
The waiting period starts from that moment on. For kidney patients, this waiting period is calculated from the first date of dialysis. The waiting time for transplants depends on an organ becoming available via Euro-transplant.
NTS and Euro-transplant are non-profit organisations and do not profit from their duties.
The fact that Curaçao has lost the transport department of the Kidney Foundation doesn’t mean it has lost the special transport of kidney patients to the dialysis centres. Curaçao has three dialysis centres: Diatel and the one at St. Elisabeth Hospital (both under the responsibility of the hospital) as well as CDC which is set up by Kurá Hulanda.
About 200 kidney patients are using the total capacity of these dialysis centres. The White & Yellow Cross will take over the transport of the kidney patients to the dialysis centres.
This is a matter of efficiency, says Alex Roose. "It has happened that the Kidney Foundation and the White & Yellow Cross were following each other to transport two neighbouring patients. It is better to have one organisation take care of this.
With two buses, six staff members and two substitutes, the organisation of the Kidney Foundation is too small to actually operate flexibly."
Other than having another employer (the White & Yellow Cross), nothing will change for the staff members.
_
