Osmania General Hospital (OGH) has become the first government healthcare facility in Telangana to have utilised a skin allograft donated from a deceased brain dead victim on a patient, who had received severe burn injuries after electrocution.
The surgeons from department of Plastic Surgery, OGH took up the procedure on Naveen, a youngster from Hyderabad who had received extensive burn injuries after getting electrocuted. Skin allograft or homograft is the skin that is harvested from brain dead victims and utilised to temporarily cover the burnt part of the burnt victim’s body.
“Twice, we had harvested skin from the patient’s thigh region. However, the degree of burns was so extensive that there was no normal
skin left that could be harvested from the patient himself. As a result, we utilised the donated skin, which was stored in our skin bank, to treat the patient,” Superintendent, OGH, Dr B Nagender said.
The Rs. 60 lakh state-of-the-art skin bank at OGH is a first of its kind facility in the two-Telugu speaking States where donated skin from brain dead victims can be harvested and stored. The donated skin is vital to save the lives of burn victims, who struggle to survive if the percentage loss of body skin is more than 50 percent.
Earlier, the OGH plastic surgeons had harvested donor skin when relatives of a patient, who was declared as brain dead at Apollo Hospitals, had donated the skin of the deceased.