DHA announces first kidney transplant

Dubai Health Authority, DHA, announced its first successful organ transplant surgery on a 27-year-old Emirati patient at Dubai Hospital.

Khalid Waleed Al Marzouq, suffering from kidney failure due to an autoimmune disease, was visiting the hospital three times a week for dialysis since 2016.

The young Emirati patient received the organ transplant at the hospital after his 24-year-old sister, Aysha, donated her kidney to save his life.

The surgery, which took six-hours, was performed, by a medical team comprising of 25 doctors, specialists and nurses from Dubai Hospital.

Both patients were discharged shortly and went back to their normal lives, the DHA announced today at a press conference, which was attended by officials including Dr Younis Kazim CEO of the Dubai Healthcare Corporation and Dr. Maryam Mohammad Al Rayssi, CEO of Dubai Hospital.

Commenting on this achievement, Humaid Al Qutami, Director-General of the DHA, said that the success of the first kidney transplant at the DHA is the first step towards implementing its organ transplant strategy and towards establishing a distinguished organ transplant centre.

Currently, 300 patients receive dialysis from Dubai and the northern parts of the UAE at Dubai Hospital, he said, adding that the strategy will help reduce death rates between 48-82 percent.

Al Qutami added that the authority is planning to conduct more organ transplant surgeries in the future and that the authority is currently preparing to perform a liver transplant.

Dr Yasser Ahmad Al Saeedi, consultant urologist and robotic surgeon at DHA’s Dubai Hospital led his team in removing the healthy kidney from the donor using laparoscopic donor nephrectomy and 3D reconstruction and printing. Dubai Hospital is the first hospital to conduct a laparoscopic donor nephrectomy in the UAE.

Meanwhile, Andrea Risaliti Consultant, General Surgery and Chairman of Organ Transplant Committee at DHA and Professor of Surgery at the University of Udine and Dr Zaid Abdul Aziz, General Surgery Consultant and Head of the Bariatric Unit in Dubai Hospital and his team conducted the organ transplant.

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