DUBAI: A 24-year-old patient, who was declared brain dead after a car accident, has saved the lives of five patients after his family agreed to donate his vital organs for transplantation at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSHRC) in Riyadh. The five patients, who were suffering from organ failure, separately received a small bowel, liver, heart and kidney from the man during simultaneous operations that took 10 hours. Expert surgeons at the Riyadh hospital worked side-by-side last month with experts from different hospital departments to perform the procedure. “These sophisticated surgeries can be only achieved, simultaneously, in a few advanced medical centers around the world, as they require a highly qualified and expert medical teams with a well-equipped infrastructure that includes modern operating rooms, lab, radiology and other specialized medical equipment,” KFSHRC chief Dr. Majid Al Fayyadh said. Al-Fayyadh said surgical teams worked all night to retrieve the organs from the donor, while a different set of experts worked on transplanting them to the five patients. The five patients were a 36-year-old female; a 34-year-old male; a 60-year-old female; a 63-year-old male and a 23-month-old baby. The hospital is known for being one of the few medical centers in the world that performs small bowel transplants, Al-Fayyadh said. The medical teams in KFSHRC confirmed all five patients were in good health and most of them have been discharged to recuperate.