CHENNAI: It all comes down to nine minutes. It takes years of experience, weeks of practice, hours of prep and several terse minutes of prayer to effect a heart transplant seamlessly. And sometimes, the difference between life and death can come down to whether the ambulance driver managed to get the harvested organ to the transplant centre in nine minutes, or less. And Fortis Malar hospital’s ambulance driver Kathir Velan made the cut as he drove the 13 km stretch from the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital in the time that it would take most people to catch an English movie.
And most of it is courtesy the Chennai City Traffic Police’s Green Channel for organ transplants. Started in 2008 when the Tamil Nadu Organ Transplant Programme was initiated, the green corridor has held good over the years to such an extent that 75 hearts have been transplanted successfully, in the city’s major hospitals. “This is the only city that has this sort of a system in India and we must think of scaling it up and adopting it in other places as well,” says Dr K R Balakrishnan, who transplanted the heart from a 27-year-old diploma holder from Kancheepuram, Loganathan, to a 21-year-old Hvovi Minocherchomji, from Mumbai.
One the first times that the green channel was used was in 2008, when a heart was transported from Apollo Multispeciality Hospitals in Teynampet to Frontier Lifeline Hospital in Mogappair in 14 minutes flat. “It is a great thing that we are not wasting an organ because of traffic,” Dr K M Cherian had told Express then. From then till now, all it takes is a quick call to the local Assistant Commissioner of Police to set things up.
The green channel owes its success to the transparency of the system, “All the 15 signals on Beach Road (Kamarajar Salai) are turned green and traffic is cleared on one lane. There is a pilot car in front of us that clears the traffic and we just have to follow him all the way to the hospital,” says Kathir, who has now transported hearts for five transplants, all of them successful.
What about excessive speeding? Kathir laughs before responding, “Today I drove at 100 kmph but sometimes it is more. There have been a few times when we have come close to hitting vehicles on the road, but we were fortunate,” he says.