In her letter to health sector officials and staff in the sector, Minister of Health Dao Hong Lan encouraged health sector officials and employees to participate in registering to donate tissues and organs to save lives following the Prime Minister's appeal.
According to Health Minister Lan, the registration rate of tissue and organ donation among the general population and especially the rate of tissue and organ donation after brainstem death in Vietnam is still very low. Statistically, just over 86,000 people registered to donate tissues and organs after death while the waiting list for organ transplants is always at tens of thousands of people and dozens of people die every day because there are no organs for transplant.
Accordingly, in the letter, the Minister of Health said that Vietnam has spent more than 30 years implementing kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, and cornea transplant techniques and medical workers have mastered these techniques. Currently, the country has 26 well-equipped organ transplant centers and their surgeons are able to perform advanced techniques
In the last two years, each year, Vietnam has performed more than 1,000 organ transplants, ranking No. 1 in Southeast Asia in the number of organ transplants per year.
However, tissue and organ donations in Vietnam are mainly from living donors, accounting for 94 percent. Donations from the dead are still very limited, unable to meet the increasing need for tissue and organ transplants. The registration rate of tissue and organ donation among the general population and especially the rate of tissue and organ donation after brain deaths in Vietnam is still very low. The rate of organ donor registration is currently 0.086 percent of the population with around 86,000 donors throughout the country.
