With 4 000 South Africans awaiting a life-saving organ transplant and 60 viable organs going to waste each week, a group of fourth year medical students has produced an artificial intelligence-driven social media network to help address the crisis.
The website of Save7, (alluding to one donor’s organs being able to save seven lives), includes an easy-to-use time capsule recording where volunteer donors can record their wishes to enable verification by their family should they die, plus a real-time chat bot, reports Chris Bateman for MedicalBrief.
There are several motivational videos, one by an advance kidney disease sufferer facing death, (whose sister died of the same genetic condition before she could source a donor organ), and a donor beneficiary whose life was transformed by a kidney transplant. Both are in their mid-twenties, the donor target audience of Save7, and are/were on life-sustaining, (but not always available), dialysis.
South Africa ranks among the worst countries in the world in identifying organ donors and has among the world’s lowest organ donor rates, (1.4 donors per million people), with just 0.2% of the population registered as organ donors.
By contrast Spain and the United States have 38 donors per million population, according to Professor Mignon McCulloch, head of solid organ transplant at the Red Cross Children’s War Memorial Hospital in Rondebosch and chairperson of the SA Transplantation Society.
Following Save 7’s launch in August last year with a social media, radio, and news outlet campaign, they are approaching an AI-verified audience of 1m people and have grown their motivational and logistics team to 104 volunteers, nationwide, mainly on medical campuses. They hope to get organ donation training into the respective medical curricula to increase awareness, counselling skills and knowledge among doctors at the beginning of their careers, and thus more efficiently facilitate donation.
South Africa has an ‘opt in’ organ donation system, in stark contrast to countries like Spain where obligatory ‘opt out’ donation systems mean that families need to secure a police affidavit to prevent organ harvesting from a medically suitable, certifiably dead relative.
Founder of Save 7, fourth year medical student Jonty Wright, says the aim is to help donors and recipients find one another.
“Our laws require the next of kin to give consent for all posthumous donations. That means that regardless of where your ID number is and what data base your next of kin are going to be consulted on; your family needs to give consent. That’s where the time capsule along with the data base of the organ donor foundation, comes in.”
McCulloch lauded the Save 7 initiative saying it would have a growing impact and save lives.
She said virtually every patient who ‘sadly dies can become an organ donor. We realise that it takes people a long time to come to terms with it, particularly when it involves children. We need to engage more teams, including nurses and administrators, and increase awareness. Getting medical student exposure to that kind of thinking early in their training is very important.”