About 40000 patients in India needs lifesaving liver transplantation procedure every year. About 0.5 liver transplants per million population are currently performed in India vs 10 per million population in developed countries. A liver is an extremely vital organ of your body. Both acute and chronic liver failure may eventually lead to the death of a patient, if left untreated. Liver Cirrhosis, Acute hepatic necrosis, biliary atresia (rare disease of the liver and bile ducts that occurs in newborns), viral hepatitis, metabolic diseases (Disorders that change the chemical activity in cells affected by the liver) and primary liver cancers are some of the diseases where Liver Transplant is recommended.
Liver transplantation is surgery to replace a diseased liver with a healthy liver from another person. A whole liver may be transplanted, or just part of one from relatives. Healthy liver graft comes from an organ donor who is brain dead or a healthy family member will donate part of their liver. In India, 80 % liver transplants are done from living donor as organ donation rates are very low. People who donate part of their liver can have healthy lives as the donor’s liver soon grows back to normal size after surgery. The part that you receive as a new liver will also grow to normal size in a few weeks. Despite of the availability of this crucial lifesaving treatment many patients keep suffering and die eventually due to skyrocketing costs of such surgeries.
This situation made Dr. Vikram Raut receives Trendsetter 2022 award from Hon. Governor determined for making quality healthcare available, accessible and affordable for everyone and choose Medicine as a career. Today, he is an internationally trained Liver transplant surgeon and pioneered many techniques of liver transplantation with his extensive experience in living-donor and diseased- donor liver transplantation. But what makes him stand out is his aspiration and determination to come back to his home land to support the fellow Indian patients with end stage liver disease and save their lives. He established successful liver transplant program in Mumbai. 30% patients were children suffering with liver disease and nearly 80% of them did not pay any money from their pockets. Fundraising for their transplants was done through charitable means like crowd-funding, funding generated thru NGOs, charitable trusts. This small effort by his team to develop a humanitarian strategy for offering financial aid to make liver transplantation accessible to the general public indeed made a big difference to the patient’s lives. During COVID pandemic, despite multiple challenges his team continued to perform a complicated surgery like liver transplant to save lives, as risk of death due to end- stage liver disease is much higher as compared to COVID.
His achievements demonstrate his undivided attention and commitment to his patients and hence a well deserved personnel for the Trendsetter 2022 Year award, which he received on February 24, 2022, at Governor House Raj Bhawan in Malabar Hill, Mumbai. Website – www.liverdocindia.com
