Osmania General Hospital has become the first civic-run healthcare facility in Telangana to perform a skin allograft on a patient who had received severe burn injuries, by utilizing the skin donated by a brain-dead victim.
Naveen, a young boy from Hyderabad, had suffered from extensive burn injuries after getting electrocuted. Surgeons from the Department of Plastic Surgery at OGH came to his rescue by conducting a skin allograft on him. The plastic surgeons had earlier harvested donor skin when relatives of a patient, who was declared brain dead at Apollo Hospitals, had donated the skin of the deceased, reported Telangana Today.
“Twice, we had harvested skin from the patient’s (Naveen’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 utilized the donated skin, which was stored in our skin bank, to treat the patient,” Superintendent, OGH, Dr B Nagender said in the news report.
Skin allograft or homograft is the skin that is harvested from brain dead victims and utilized to temporarily cover the burnt part of the burnt victim’s body.
The skin bank set up at OGH is the first of its kind facility in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, 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 per cent.