SIBU: More than 1,000 people in the Sibu region have pledged to donate their organs in campaigns organised by the Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care of Sibu Hospital.
The department’s director Dr Betty Lee Leh Sieng said they have been actively promoting organ donation in the community in an effort to get more donors.
“We have organised yearly organ donation campaigns in Sibu town, even in Kanowit and Matu through health outreach programmes.
“To this day, we have managed to get more than 1,000 people to pledge as organ donors,” she said at the launch of National Anaesthesia Day 2019 yesterday.
Meanwhile, she said Sibu Hospital aims to provide the highest standard of anaesthetics, intensive care, pain management and related services for the people in the central region.
She explained that education and awareness programmes are much-needed, as there are members of the public who do not understand what anaesthesia is about.
Dr Lee also said that with the advancement in technology, gone were the days whereby anaesthesia was administered with a patient breathing through an ether-soaked handkerchief as there was no control over how much anaesthesia was administered.
“Anaesthesia has evolved in tandem with improvements in surgical practices that would avert 1.5 million deaths each year,” she said.
