HAVE A HEART

These medical students aren't waiting until they graduate to save lives

- MAXINE PETERS

IT MADE no sense to him. As a doctor in training he was learning how to save lives and sitting in front of him was a woman who seemed doomed to die, possibly unnecessarily.

In his first year of medical studies Jonty Wright was horrified when a patient at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town told him that because of an inherited condition her kidneys were slowly failing.

Her younger sister had died of the same thing two years earlier because a donor couldn’t be found in time and now it seemed the same fate awaited her.

“It was almost like she was waiting to die,” Jonty (20) tells us.

“There’s nothing that medicine can do for the condition other than her getting a transplant.”

After hearing her story, Jonty did some research and discovered there are more than 4 000 South Africans desperately waiting for a transplant, but very few have a chance of getting one because there aren’t enough registered donors.

“To add insult to injury, I also found out that there were more than 60 viable organs going to waste every week [throughout South Africa].”

For Jonty it seemed unfathomable that people don’t know how much good they can do by signing up as donors and giving permission for their organs to be harvested after death.

But after chatting to his friends he realised the problem: there’s a serious lack of knowledge on the topic, especially among the youth.

As a full-time student he didn’t have time to go door to door to get people to sign up – but he could use technology.

“I am very into tech and in my free time I would play around with building AI chatbots,” Jonty says.