A 31-year-old patient at a hospital in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province received a donated heart within three hours in the nation's first heart transplant surgery after China implemented measures to speed up the transport of organs.
The heart was removed from the donor in the First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University, and it took only three hours for the heart to arrive at Wuhan Union Hospital (WUH) - which is half the normal travel time, the hospital told the Global Times on Monday.
It took only five minutes for the medical team to check in at the airport, and the flight arrived 26 minutes in advance. Police also escorted the delivery along the route, WUH said.
"A donated heart must be delivered within six hours, or the risk of infection and complications would increase, and the reduced time offers a higher chance for the surgery to succeed since every minute counts for heart transplants," Dong Nianguo, one of the transplant surgeons, told the Global Times.
This is the first heart delivered after six government agencies including China's top health and traffic authority jointly issued a notice on Friday to open a "green passage" to ensure fast and safe transport for donated organs.
Airlines have been asked to provide priority boarding services and allow planes carrying organs to depart quickly. Vehicles carrying donated organs should get priority in passing toll stations, and health staff transporting human organs can board a train before buying tickets, if necessary, read the notice. A 24-hour emergency hotline was also created.
China has been suffering from a serious shortage of donated organs, with only 7,721 organs donated in 2015 while 300,000 patients need organ transplants every year.
However, many organs are wasted due to a lack of organ maintenance, shortage of hospitals qualified to perform transplants, and also long delivery times that made the organs unusable, organ transplant surgeons previously told the Global Times.
China banned the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners from 2015. As of March, China had received organs from 6,624 donors, making it the third in the world in terms of the number of organs donated every year, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission.
