Most people have heard of organ donations, but tissue donations are not as well-known yet they can play a key role in saving lives.
Dr. Michael Gross is an orthopaedic surgeon and medical director for the regional tissue bank at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax.
Gross says there's a need for donations and he wants people to understand the difference one donation can make in the lives of so many patients.
“It's essential,” says Gross. “Basically in our job, when you're rebuilding the body you have situations where there's bits missing, after trauma, after you've cut out a tumor, after things have worn out, or broken.”
The QEII’s regional tissue bank is the largest comprehensive tissue centre in Canada.
Dr. Gross says the bank supports a number of donations and transplantations, including ophthalmology, cardiovascular, neurological, and reconstructive burn surgery.
“So you can take someone who's blind, who has a problem with their cornea, and give them a new cornea and they can see again,” says Gross.
It's one of many life changing procedures made possible by tissue donation.
The bank's health services manager, Harold Taylor, says without more donors, the wait list for surgeries will continue to grow.
“Currently, in Nova Scotia there's about 140 patients on the wait list for a cornea transplant, that can translate into up to a three year wait list,” says Taylor.
For more than 23 years, the regional tissue bank has provided transplants to over 180 centres.
“We're involved in the entire process – from donor screening, suitability, and consent, to the recovery of tissue, as well as the processing, storage, and distribution,” says Taylor.
“Tissue donation has a huge impact, and the number of tissues that are being used keeps on going up, it's limited only by availability,” says Gross. “So the more tissues we have, the more good reconstruction we can do.”
Dr. Gross says if you are interested in being a donor, there's a couple of things you should consider.
“When you're looking at your will, also look at whether you want to donate your tissues because that's going to have an impact on a lot of people,” says Gross. “It's one of the best examples of human behavior, here we have people gifting something to other people without really any conditions, other than the fact that we should use it well. So our mandate as a tissue bank, is to respect the gift, and to make sure that gift is used in the best possible manner by people who need it.”
That single gift can help better the lives of many people.
