Draft for eye bank regulation sent to Centre

MUMBAI, OCT 8: To regulate eyebanks in the city, the state government has forwarded a draft proposal to the Central government on changes...

MUMBAI, OCT 8: To regulate eyebanks in the city, the state government has forwarded a draft proposal to the Central government on changes that should be made in the existing system

Dr PN Shinde, joint director opthalmology, state directorate of health services, said that a draft proposal has been sent to the Central Government which is supposed to frame the rules regulating eye banks. At the moment, there is very little to regulate the activities of the eye banks in the state, he said.

In the draft, one of ideas mooted is that there a proper inspection of eye bank infrastructure should be carried out before registration is given. Eye banks will also have to assign corneas to patients as per a waiting list, said Dr Shinde. If either of these conditions is violated, the licence of the respective eye bank should be immediately cancelled, he added.

A change in strategy is being planned to improve the rate of eye donation, he stated. Instead of the routine method of getting people to pledge their eyes by filling out a form, there is a plan to train medical and paramedical staff to motivate relatives of a critical patients to donate eyes, he explained.

Dr T P Lahane, professor and head of the opthalmology department, JJ Hospital also said that the existing network of the city8217;s 20 eyebamks need regulation. He alleged that one of the main problems is that some eyebanks exploit the corneas commercially by selling the cornea to the person who can pay the price, rather than keeping to the waitlisted patients.

In some cases, eyeballs are removed by quacks and passed onto eyebanks for a sum of money. As there are no checks on the system, there is no way to find out which eye bank the cornea has been sent to, he alleged.

For a good eye banking system, it is important to have all the necessary facilities at each eye bank which wants to get a licence for operating such a unit, Dr Lahane said. After this, there should be a central registration for all the patients needing a transplant and this should be strictly followed under all circumstances, he said.

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Agreeing with this, Dr Lahane said that a hospital cornea retrieval program should be started in each hospital so that some particular staff can be assigned for talking to the relatives. The situation at present is that against a requirement of 80,000 donations annually in the country, there is an actual donation of 15,000 eyeballs, and in the city while there is a requirement of 40,000 eye balls annually, there is a donation of 3,000 eye balls, he said.