Goa Medical College To Get A Skin Bank for patients with extensive burns

This is aimed at helping victims with severe burns over 60-70%, by increasing their chances of survival as skin grafts have excellent prognosis and can considerably improve the survival rate in burns patients.

Dr Yuri Amborcar, Head of Department of Plastic Surgery at GMC spoke to Times of India and said, "We have proposed to set up the skin bank so that patients having extensive burns can be saved. Overall burn incidents have dropped but people suffering burns in factory accidents have not. Those patients come with severe injuries and skin grafting can be of help to them."

The skin stored at such banks remains viable upto 5 years provided that it is stored in a suitable storage medium. The GMC has got an approval to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with National Burns Centre, to set up a skin bank. The National Burns Centre, Dr. Amborcar added has a licence from the Euro skin bank. "It will share expertise for setting up skin bank in the GMC. Our staff including some doctors, nurses and multi-tasking staff were trained at the National Burns Centre," he elaborated.

Annually, plastic surgery department records about 150-180 cases, with four to five factory related severe burn incidents. Cases involving cooking gas explosions also show up with extensive burns, and with poor prognoses, though in the last few years, the department has succeeded in reducing mortalities among patients with 30 to 60 percentage of burns.The plastic surgery department will be shifted to the new super speciality block that is currently used as a Covid-19 facility. The super speciality block was converted into Covid hospital in late May after hospitals in Goa ran out of beds. While shifting of GMC's super specialities to the new block was delayed owing to pandemic, they are likely to be moved there in next two months.