According to various news sites and BBC Radio Wales this morning,the UK Organ Donation Task force - a government advisory committee -a panel of experts, has rejected plans to presume everyone consents to being an organ donor unless they opt out.
The UK position at present is there are around 8,000 people who need an organ transplant but only 3,000 operations are carried out each year.Every year, 1,000 people in the UK die after waiting for a transplant.
BBC health correspondent Jane Dreaper said the issue of organ donation goes to the heart of people's feelings about death, and the taskforce's assessment included interviews with representatives of seventeen different faiths.
The British Medical Association back the idea of "soft" presumed consent, where family members have the final say - even if the patient has not opted out.Evidence from other countries is varied , but mostly has shown that presumed consent makes little difference, what has made a bigger difference is good PR and awareness to become a donor.
The medical profession is divided on the issue .In September, intensive care doctors told the BBC they were deeply concerned about any radical changes to the law on organ donation.Research by the Intensive Care Society suggests many specialists are worried that such a move would damage the trust between patients and doctors.
A report recommending a radical overhaul of the UK organ donor network in a bid to double the number of organs available for transplant, has already been published by the Organ Donor Taskforce, and is being implemented.
Tim Statham of the National Kidney Federation said organs were being wasted because of a lack of capacity in the NHS - a situation which presumed consent would not solve.
Joyce Robins, co-director of Patient Concern, said: 'We can only hope that Gordon Brown does not follow the example of the Welsh Health minister Edwina Hart, who rejected the all-party Welsh Assembly report when they decided against presumed consent after weeks of evidence and is still pressing ahead."
This is such an emotive area, but surely if we set up panels of experts and their evidence is not to progress this then alternative ways of encouraging organ donation rather than compulsion is they way to go.
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Presumed consent is surely the way forward?
If we're big enough to opt out of travel insurance when we book our Ryanair flights, or to tick no thank you for the 'can we add you to our mailing lists' box, then surely we can say no thank you to organ donation, if we so choose.
Better to make people say no than say yes.....but hey, I'm not sure people should even be allowed to say no!
The problem is who would the actual "experts" comprise? This is an emotive area in itself.
I think a policy of presumed consent, if imposed, would be horrible. Some patients with serious injuries and/or their loved ones would start to question the motive behind medical treatments - are they being withheld deliberately to harvest the patient's organs because the doctors think it would be better to use that patient's organs to treat x number of other patients? Such calculations might not happen - but that will not stop patients and their families from thinking it. The damage to patient-doctor trust/relationship could be huge and change the way we look at doctors.
Talking to Joanne about it this morning, she asked "what would you do if something happened to me?"
I didn't know, I should have because she has been giving blood for 20 odd years, until now I couldn't have said "it was her wish".
But then she said, "I wonder why I didn't tell you?"
Personally I think presumed consent is political smoke and mirrors, particularly after listening to R4 on the way home tonight.
This is such a difficult issue because many people do not want to talk about death. I agree with your conclusion: surely the way to go has to be via education.
As the organs are of no use to us whatsoever when we die, I was rather hoping that the law would be passed to remove anything they wanted automatically unless there was notification that the person had requested (earlier) that they didn't want to give.
The only thing that might go wrong in doing this, is that patients would be "bumped off" because they had a rare type of tissue type that was urgently needed.
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Bad move undoubtedly - unfortunately evenif they had said YES YES YES then it wouldn't affect us. We had our chance for presumed consent a few months ago and Edwina Hart rejected it. Stupid.
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