’The Most Important Call in Life’ Campaign to Lead to a Higher Number of Donors and Transplants

Hemofarm Group and its Foundation, in partnership with the Serbian Ministry of Health, the Republic Health Insurance Fund, and the patient association ’Together for a New Life’, is relaunching the campaign for increasing the number of donors and transplantations ’The Most Important Call in Life’. The campaign is aimed at encouraging the culture of organ donation with the goal of building a more humane and solidary society.

On this occasion, in front of the billboard on Dečanska Street in Belgrade, next to the patient Slavica Obradović, who has been waiting for a call for liver transplantation for nine years, Ronald Seeliger, the CEO of Hemofarm, invited all citizens of Serbia to support donation, as the greatest act of humanity.

‘With The Most Important Call in Life campaign, we want to awaken humanity and provide a chance for almost 2,000 of our citizens who are waiting for that call every day. A lot has been said and done in the last seven years, but patients in Serbia are still waiting for the most important call. Unfortunately, Serbia is still at the bottom of the list when it comes to posthumous organ donation. It shouldn't be like that. By donating organs, we help others to continue living and that is why it is the greatest act of humanity. I invite you to join us and support organ donation, because sometimes it only takes one call to change someone's life for the better’ said Seeliger.

The Minister of Health in the Government of the Republic of Serbia Prof. Dr. Danica Grujičić said that the new law on transplantation was ready.

‘The new law provides for voluntary organ donation, but those who don’t want to donate their organs will now be registered and that register will be kept by the Directorate for Biomedicine. The basic change in the rulebook on establishing brain death is the change of the definition, now formulated as the complete cessation of the functioning of cells and tissues in the human body’ said Minister Grujičić and added that the media have an irreplaceable role to explain to people what brain death is and to invite them to be organ donors and take part in this cooperation. ‘A disease does not choose. I appeal to all of those who lose their loved ones, even though it is difficult, to think about the fact that some people will be able to live normally owing to their humane act’ emphasized Minister Grujičić.

Danica Lukić, deputy director of the Division for Health Care Abroad, pointed out that we must quickly take steps to provide donors in our own country.

‘For those types of transplantations that are not performed in Serbia, the Fund sends patients for treatment abroad. However, regardless of the financial resources provided by the state for treatment abroad, it does not help us in this situation, because foreign transplant centres set reciprocity in organ exchange as a condition for accepting our patients for cadaveric transplantation,. We have to urgently take steps to ensure donors, because there is no time, and there is no willingness of other countries to provide organs to save the lives of our people; that is something that we need to provide by ourselves’ said Lukić.

There are currently around 2,000 people in Serbia who are waiting for a donor and an organ transplant. The faces of ‘The Most Important Call in Life’ campaign are patients and doctors who will inform the citizens about the magnitude of this problem and the importance of organ donation, in order to increase the number of donors and save the lives of people waiting for organ transplantation. The previous campaign, carried out in 2016, increased the number of donors from 2 to 6 per million inhabitants, and Serbia got the National Donor Day, 6 June. Afterwards, the COVID-19 pandemic happened, which almost completely stopped the donation and transplantation program, which is why it is once again necessary to engage the entire society in order to change the statistics that put Serbia in the rear of Europe. Everyone can be a hero nowadays, if they become a donor.

‘The Most Important Call in Life’ campaign was initiated by the Hemofarm Foundation, in partnership with The Ministry of Health of Serbia, Republic Fund for Health Insurance and with the support of the Association of Transplant Patients and Patients in Need of Organ Transplantation ‘Together for a New Life’ and creative agencies ‘Jazavac i utorak’ (‘Badger and Tuesday’) and ‘Orange studio’.