Patna: Calcutta's Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences on Friday launched its transplant clinic here.

The cardiac and liver transplant unit doctors of the hospital group will screen patients at the clinic on the last Saturday of every month and transplant cases will be referred to the Calcutta centre so that the surgeries can be done there.

The clinic will work to create awareness among residents about organ donation so that it can create a pool of donors for the transplant surgeries apart from identifying patients in need of transplants.

"We have tied up with Nidan clinic, located at pillar number 81 in Raja Bazaar. In the initial phase, the clinic will be run at Nidan clinic," Nitin Manjunath, the facility director of Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences, said during a news conference on Friday.

On the idea behind starting this clinic, Nitin said: "A patient from Ranchi was recently diagnosed with heart failure. We also got a donor for the patient in our Calcutta hospital but the donor's relative refused to give consent for extraction of the organ. That's why we thought of running this clinic in Patna so that we can screen probable patients apart from getting a chance to create a pool of donors for transplant surgeries over here."

Patients from Bihar and Jharkhand in need of cardiac transplant surgeries can travel to Calcutta within one-and-a-half hour by air. "The window period for heart transplant is four-and-a half hours. We can save a sea of lives. Brain dead patients can donate three to four organs, so we can save four lives. It depends on other factors also. We have to get various tests, including blood group matching, done on the probable donor to find out whether his/her organ can be used for the transplant surgery or not," said Lalit Kapoor, cardiac surgeon of the hospital.

While heart transplant cases can be done at the Calcutta-based hospital, liver transplant surgeries will be conducted at our Bangalore facility. "The Calcutta-based facility is yet to get licence to conduct liver transplant while 12 liver transplants have already been conducted at the Bangalore centre in the past six months. The cases have been done with the help of live donors. People can fly to Bangalore to get liver transplant done there for something between Rs 16 lakh and Rs 18 lakh and between Rs 12 lakh and Rs 14 lakh for heart transplant," said liver transplant and gastrointestinal surgeon Dr Pankaj Sonar.

Both the heart and liver transplant packages contain all charges, including hospitalisation fee, among other fees," said Sonar.