DISHEARTENED by the hurdles her godfather faced when he needed a kidney transplant, 17-year-old Zoe Johnson started Lobby For Life and last week launched a Jamaica House petition for the buildout of a comprehensive national organ transplant programme.

While the country has made strides with similar programmes at Cornwall Regional Hospital and the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), Johnson noted that many individuals, like her godfather, still struggle to get transplants and have had to seek donors overseas, which is expensive.

Organ transplantation is the process of surgically removing an organ or tissue from one person, the organ donor, and placing it into another person — the recipient. Transplantation becomes necessary when the recipient’s organ has failed or has been damaged by disease or injury.

Zoe shared that her godfather, Jaime Douglas, was diagnosed with end-stage kidney failure in 2022 and spent three years undergoing dialysis three times a week. She said he finally received a kidney transplant earlier this year, through a programme in the United States, after efforts to find a local donor failed.

“It was a lot of back and forth. He couldn’t find anybody [a donor], based on his blood type and all these things, so he just continued with dialysis and everyone was just not sure what would happen. My dad actually did a whole lot of work trying to find someone who would be willing to just help someone they didn’t know, and who would be willing to give their kidney.

“Advertisements were put up…[asking] anybody who would be willing, and there were a few people, but they wanted money for it, and it was just a whole lot,” she told the Jamaica Observer.

Zoe said her father, who was not a match for her godfather, later found a programme in New York that matches donors with patients by ensuring a kidney is provided if one is donated. Her father donated his kidney to a stranger, ultimately saving Douglas’s life.

The 17-year-old said her godfather’s situation opened her eyes to the plight of so many others, as she later found out that an estimated one in seven Jamaicans will develop kidney disease at some point in their lives.

She then sprang into action to figure out how she could help raise awareness about the need for a fully functioning national organ transplant programme, which led her to the Office of the Prime Minister website, where she discovered she could create a petition to be considered by the relevant authorities if it received 15,000 signatures within 40 days.

“I decided…to just start a petition, but I need to not only do that, I had to create a programme for it, because people aren’t just going to sign a petition with nothing backing it up; so that’s why Lobby for Life was started,” she said.

The organisation, which focuses on organ donation and blood donation, was started this year. She told the Sunday Observer that her family is big on blood donation, and every three months her parents donate.

Since there is also a struggle to get blood donors locally, Zoe decided to also use Lobby for Life to highlight the need.

With her petition for a national organ transplant programme now live on the Jamaica House website, the 17-year-old is pleading with Jamaicans to sign it.

In the petition, she is calling for a system in which individuals in need of the life-saving surgery receive support through the National Health Fund, and for more local doctors and nurses to be trained in the procedure, as well as for more operating rooms to be allocated. She’s also advocating for a donor symbol to be placed on driver’s licence in the case of an emergency, facilitating swift action.

“Kidney disease specifically is so common in Jamaica, and so if you know anyone who is suffering, if you know anyone who needs an organ, not necessarily just a kidney but an organ, then sign the petition because it could help them. Even if you don’t know anyone, just think about if you know people who know people, because it is so common.

“A lot of people I know would know someone who is suffering, and so just think about that, and think about if you would want to have a second chance at life like these people deserve,” Zoe said.

She plans to take her petition to the streets and social media to gather the needed 15,000 signatures.

“It’s a whole lot, but I’m planning on printing out posters with a QR code that’s linked to the petition, and putting it in all of the dialysis centres, because that’s where people will really care about it, those people who are directly suffering, and I’m hoping that they’ll share with their friends,” she told the Sunday Observer.

She also plans to attend and upcoming blood drive, during which she’ll share the link to the petition.

People willing to sign the petition can do so by visiting the Jamaica House website or the through the available link on the Lobby For Life website.

According to Zoe, to sign the petition, individuals are required to enter their e-mail address. They will then be sent an e-mail that asks them to confirm that they are signing the petition. She noted that if confirmation is not given, the signature will not be counted. She urged interested signatories to check their spam messages if the e-mail does not show up in their inbox.

The young advocate noted that while a national programme might be expensive and will require training for both doctors and nurses, it is needed to ease the burden on Jamaicans who have chronic kidney disease and other conditions that require a transplant to save their lives.

She added that Jamaica once led the Caribbean region in organ transplants, as far back as 1970 when Professor Lawson Douglas performed the first kidney transplant at Kingston Public Hospital (KPH). A year later, in 1971, two more transplants — both from deceased donors — were successfully carried out.

The transplantation programme soon became a collaborative effort between KPH and the UHWI, with patients selected from both institutions and donor kidneys allocated between the two renal units.

In 1987, the country saw its first living donor transplant at UHWI, led by Professor Douglas and the late Professor George Nicholson. The transplant programme continued until 2001, with a few live donor procedures taking place at KPH between 2001 and 2005.

In 2013, Cornwall Regional Hospital performed its first living donor transplant with the support of Transplant Links Community (TLC), a UK-based charity. Five years later, in 2018, UHWI relaunched its organ transplant programme, also with assistance from TLC, giving patients with end-stage kidney failure renewed hope and the opportunity for an improved quality of life.

While transplant programmes continue at the UHWI and Cornwall Regional, there have been calls for a national programme that raises awareness about the importance of organ donation to increase donors and save lives.