PESHAWAR: Khyber Teaching Hospital is the second health facility after Institute of Kidney Diseases to launch free of cost renal transplant on Sehat Card Plus as part of the plan by Medical Transplantation Regulatory Authority to speed up such procedures due to growing waiting list of patients.

A team led by transplant surgeon Shahid Ahmad Khan performed the operation on a 40-year-old person from Charsadda prior to retrieval of kidney from his 51-year-old brother, a press release said. It said that the cost of the procedure was around Rs2 million in a private hospital.

This was the first case under SCP and patients will also receive costless post-transplant medication for one year. KTH’s Kidney Transplant Centre will get support from specialists of allied departments in an effort to provide advanced healthcare services to people, according to the press release.

Renal transplants are carried out after the approval granted by Medical Transplantation Regulatory Authority. The authority was established to discourage illegal organ transplantation.

KTH director Dr Sajjadullah Dawar told this scribe that workup on 25 couples would be completed soon and they would get ‘no objection certificate’ from MTRA for their surgery. “In future, we have planned to do two cases a week,” he added.

He said that cashless transplants would benefit more patients soon. “Then we will be able to do five transplants a week and will gradually double it,” he said.

So far, SCP covered the patients requiring renal transplants with legal donors at Institute of Kidney Diseases (IKD) Hayatabad Medical Complex. The facility is now available to recipients of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

SCP started renal transplant programme in 2020 and so far 378 cases were conducted.

There are more than 3,000 patients on dialysis in the province’s public sector hospitals, most of whom require transplants but they need donors within their close family members.

There is intense need for renal donors to facilitate patients after start of transplants by KTH.

Transplant programme included free bone marrow in 2021, which benefitted 29 patients. Since 2025, 130 people underwent liver transplants. Cochlear implant was started in 2024 and 366 have availed the facility.

MTRA deputy administrator Asif Masood said that transplant centres would implement swap transplantation because of non-availability of a matching family donor.

“We are seeking support of religious scholars, professionals and all members of society to promote organ donations. An online programme has also been launched by MTRA to register people for deceased donor transplant programme. Under it the people can register themselves as organ donor,” he said.

There is severe shortage of organ donors. Patients with both damaged kidneys need renal transplants but their tissues don’t match with their legal donors. In such cases doctors opt for swap donors where two or more incompatible donor-recipient pairs exchange their donors to receive healthy and matching kidneys.

IKD has lined up two swap transplants, which is a sigh of relief for families struggling to find matching tissues for their respective patients.

Scores of people are awaiting renal and other organ transplants but the number of donors is less and cannot meet the demand, therefore, deceased organ donation programme has been launched.

More than Rs2 billion was spent on the programme and a total of 905 persons have got transplants and implants so far.

Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2026