Karachi: Renowned Pakistani-origin cardiac transplant surgeon Dr Asif Hasan has questioned why Pakistan, despite becoming the first Muslim-majority nuclear power, has yet to establish a comprehensive heart transplantation programme.
Addressing a ceremony held in his honour at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD) in Karachi, Dr Hasan said that although Pakistan had legislation governing organ donation, a lack of public awareness and willingness to donate organs remained major obstacles to the development of transplantation services.
According to Dr Hasan, the organ donation rate in Pakistan stands at just 0.5 percent.
He urged the audience to reflect on their own willingness to donate organs, asking how many had personally registered or made arrangements for organ donation after death, including discussing the matter with their children and other family members.
“Unless society is willing, a surgeon cannot perform a transplant,” he emphasised, explaining that transplantation depended not only on surgical expertise but also on the availability of donated organs and the consent of donors’ families.
Dr Hasan said more than 2,500 heart transplants were performed worldwide every year, and the procedure had become an established medical practice in many countries.
He observed that heart transplantation had become so routine in several parts of the world that such procedures no longer necessarily made headlines, unlike in countries where transplantation programmes remained underdeveloped.
Reflecting on the history of cardiac transplantation, Dr Hasan recalled that he was around 12 years old when the first successful human heart transplant was performed in 1967. He said medical science had advanced enormously since then, making procedures once considered extraordinary a routine part of specialised cardiac care in several countries.
He stressed that Pakistan needed to raise public awareness and promote a culture of organ donation if it wanted to make meaningful progress towards establishing a comprehensive heart transplantation programme.
Expressing his pleasure at visiting NICVD, Dr Hasan described the institution as an important centre for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases and acknowledged its contribution to advancing specialised cardiac care in Pakistan.
Dr Hasan was recently honoured with the Pride of Britain Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to paediatric cardiac surgery and patient care in the United Kingdom over more than three decades.
During his career at Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, he performed more than 4,000 open-heart surgeries and made significant contributions to paediatric cardiac surgery, heart transplantation and the training of cardiac surgeons.
His remarks have once again brought attention to the challenges of organ donation, the need for greater public awareness and the importance of establishing a comprehensive heart transplantation programme in Pakistan.