By Asha Persad

The University of Barcelona has taken the lead in implementing a new project, called the European-Mediterranean Postgraduate Program on Organ Donation and Transplantation (EMPODaT), a postgraduate program that promotes the initiation of organ donation and transplantation in Egypt, Lebanon and Morocco. The objective of the program is to develop an academic curriculum where students will be trained to become specialists in organ donation and transplantation.

Statistics have shown that there is significant variation in organ donation and transplantation rates among countries due to economic, legal and socio-cultural differences. The program’s developers believe that improving the training of professionals will be essential to increasing rates of donation in seven target countries: Morocco, Egypt, Sweden, Germany, France, Lebanon, and Spain.

The program is designed for specialists, and will focus on developing academic and scientific resources for an e-learning platform that will eventually be accessible to people training to be specialists. The project will also focus on grooming a group of twelve individuals to become EMPODaT coordinators in their countries of origin and building a consulting network with other universities and international institutions and bodies that focus on organ transplantation.

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