The family of a woman from Sibiu who choked on food donated her organs. The first sampling from the county in 2024

The family of a 50-year-old woman who arrived in hospital in a serious condition after choking on food on a terrace in Sibiu decided that her organs should be harvested to help save more lives, informs the publication Turnul Sfatului .

Thanks from the Siberian doctors

The patient was declared brain dead by doctors, and teams of doctors from Bucharest, Cluj and Iași participated in the process of taking the organs, Cristina Bălău, spokesperson of the Sibiu County Hospital, announced on Monday.

The organ harvesting intervention – liver, kidney, cornea and bone – was carried out on Sunday, April 28, 2024. The team from Bucharest took bone tissue, the doctors from Iasi harvested the liver and cornea, and the team from Cluj took the kidneys. After the sampling, the teams of doctors urgently left for the transplant centers they belong to.

The 50-year-old patient was brought on April 21, 2024 to the Emergency Department of the Sibiu County Emergency Clinical Hospital, intubated and mechanically ventilated, after mechanical asphyxiation. From the UPU, according to the initial assessment, the patient was taken over by the Neurology Service and, during the investigations, her already precarious condition worsened, being urgently taken over by the Neurosurgery Department in serious condition, where she was operated on during the same day, due to an intracranial hematoma.

“The Sibiu County Emergency Clinic Hospital wishes to convey its condolences and thanks to the grieving family for the beautiful gesture of accepting the patient to become an organ donor, a medical act that will certainly give a new chance at life to some patients in suffering,” it conveys Cristina Bălău, spokesperson of the Sibiu County Hospital.

According to official data, the 50-year-old woman choked on food while she was dining on the terrace of a restaurant on Școala de Únot street, in the afternoon of Sunday, April 21. Three men, including a Sibiu Red Cross volunteer, intervened to give the woman first aid until the crews arrived.

The number of donors is increasing

The sampling carried out at SCJU Sibiu was the first carried out in the county since the beginning of the current year. Romania had 14 brain-dead donors nationally in January-March 2024.

“In the first three months of this year, there are twice as many donors compared to last year, in the same period. I hope it’s also because we’re doing something right. The most important mission we have is to promote the life-saving act of donation and implicitly increase the number of donors. Because without donation there is no transplant”, said in an interview for Panorama the doctor Genady Vatachki, executive director of the National Transplant Agency (ANT) and surgeon at the Fundeni Clinical Institute in the capital.

The hopes are that at the end of the year the threshold of 100 donors will be reached, a threshold that Romania has not reached since before the pandemic. If in 2021 we faced a national shortage of organs, which led to the alarming growth of waiting lists, especially for kidneys and livers, from 2022 a return was observed.

We oscillate between 85 and 86 donors per year, a figure that places us at the tail of the European Union, ahead of Bulgaria, which is even worse than us from the perspective of organs taken.

Two types of consent to take

Unlike other European countries, Romania faces several problems that result in a small number of organ donors. First of all, our legislation calls for informed consent.

Thus, if a person wishes to become a donor, he can go to a notary public to complete a document declaring that he agrees to this, in the event of a diagnosis of brain death. Despite the signed document and membership in a national register under the administration of the National Transplant Agency (ANT), the family still has the last word.

In addition to the states that have informed consent (opt-in), such as Romania, there are European countries that have another consent system, known as opt-out, i.e. the principle of presumed consent, in the situation where there is no refusal expressed before death.

In general, in all European countries there is a national register in which every citizen can register, expressing their agreement or refusal to donate their organs. But, even in states where consent is presumed, the family’s wishes can be taken into account (soft opt-out).