Nawal Kishore Chowdhary from Begusarai, the first patient to have got his cornea transplant done at IGIMS

People wishing to donate their eyes to the eye bank of Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences may give a second thought to the noble idea.

Chances are that when you contact the eye bank official on the phone number 0612-2296019, he would express the hospital’s inability to send its team for collection of the cornea, rather ask you to reach it to the hospital.

The Telegraph did a reality check on Tuesday to find out how the eye bank functioned. When this correspondent, posing as a Naubatpur resident, called up the eye bank at 5.23pm and said her neighbour was on deathbed and wished to donate his cornea, the lady official expressed inability to send the hospital team to the destination to collect the cornea.

The official asked this correspondent to bring the dying man to the hospital if he really wished to donate his eyes.

According to the norm, if anybody wishes to donate his/her cornea before his/her death and contacts any eye bank, the bank concerned sends a team to collect the cornea from the patient once he/she was dead.

“See, a form has to be filled up and there should be a witness of the procedure. We cannot send a team but you can do one thing. Bring the patient to the hospital if he really wants to donate his eyes,” she said.

On being told about the experience, Dr Sunil Kumar Singh, a member of the body of governors of IGIMS, said he would take up the matter with the director Dr N.R. Biswas. “It is deplorable if a person wishes to donate his/her cornea but the eye bank is unable to collect the cornea. An eye bank runs 24x7. The collection, transportation, storage and distribution of the cornea — all this is taken care of by the eye bank itself,” said Singh.

However, IGIMS medical superintendent Dr S.K. Shahi said the lady official might have misunderstood the request. “You requested the eye bank official to get the cornea collected from Naubatpur. She must have thought that Naubatpur was outside the district and so, expressed inability to send the hospital team. Our team attends to Patna district only. Doing the same from outside the district is not possible as the donated cornea can be used only within four hours of its extraction,” said Shahi.

Dr Vibhuti Prasad Sinha, the head of the IGIMS eye department, said: “I am extremely sorry if this has happened. We are trying our best in running the eye bank properly. Yesterday (Monday), we got a call from Aurangabad. Immediately, our team got ready to collect the cornea but just then we got to know that the patient died of septicaemia and his white blood corpuscle count was very high. So, we could not have used the cornea. So we dropped our plan of collecting the cornea. Our team is around even at 6pm when the call came today (Tuesday).”

The medical superintendent and the HoD had contradictory opinions about the norms for sending the hospital’s cornea extraction team.