A green corridor enabled a donor heart to travel nearly 95 km from PGIMS Rohtak to Fortis Hospital, Shalimar Bagh, in 63 minutes, helping doctors perform a transplant on a 47-year-old Delhi man with advanced heart failure.
The transplant involved hospital teams, transplant coordinators, the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO), the State Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (SOTTO), and police authorities in Haryana and Delhi. Their coordination ensured that the heart could be moved without interruption within the critical time window for organ transplantation.
The recipient, Chanchal Yadav, had been living with severe heart failure for several years. According to the report, his heart’s pumping capacity had continued to deteriorate despite treatment. He had become bedridden because of extreme breathlessness and recurrent life-threatening cardiac episodes.
The donor heart became available at PGIMS Rohtak, triggering the urgent movement operation. Police authorities in the two states helped establish the green corridor, allowing the transport vehicle to pass through the inter-city route with minimal stoppage. The 63-minute journey covered the distance between the Rohtak hospital and the Delhi transplant centre.
A heart transplant is among the most time-critical procedures in medicine because the period between organ retrieval and transplantation directly affects the viability of the donated organ. Dr Dinesh Kumar Mittal, senior director and head of cardiothoracic and vascular surgery at Fortis Hospital, said the procedure depended on coordination between organ retrieval, transplant surgery, anaesthesia, perfusion and critical care teams.
“A heart transplant is among the most time-critical procedures in medicine, where every minute can have a direct bearing on the outcome,” Dr Mittal said. He described the operation as the result of teams working with “a shared sense of urgency and purpose”.
Dr Naresh Kumar Goyal, principal director and head of the hospital’s cardiology and heart failure programme, said Yadav had reached a stage where medication and an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator were no longer sufficient to manage his condition. At that point, he said, transplantation offered the most definitive treatment option and a meaningful opportunity to improve the patient’s quality of life.
The case highlights the operational role of urban and inter-city mobility systems in emergency medicine. A transplant is not dependent only on surgical capacity at the receiving hospital. It also requires rapid communication between institutions, trained transplant coordinators, organ retrieval teams and traffic authorities capable of clearing a route across administrative boundaries.
For the patient and his family, the journey was part of a larger chain that began with the donor family’s decision to make the heart available. Yadav thanked the medical teams and the donor’s family, saying the donation had given him a second chance at life.
The transplant was carried out by a multidisciplinary team led by Dr Mittal at Fortis Hospital, Shalimar Bagh. The hospital’s teams and the participating authorities coordinated the organ’s transport and the subsequent transplant procedure.
