Organ donation policy

According to a report in the UK's Daily Telegraph, the UK government's Organ Donation Taskforce is about to recommend that the UK does not move to a system of presumed consent, claiming that people are not ready for such a move. In a system of presumed consent, all people would be assumed to be willing to allow their healthy organs to be used to help others in the event of their death, unless they had explicitly indicated that they did not want their organs to be used in this way. The current system assumes the opposite; people must explicitly indicate that they are willing to allow their organs to be used.

The UK has a persistent shortage of organ donors. The Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson has criticised the conclusion of the taskforce, saying "People are dying, people are suffering and many people are living on a knife edge of despair, waiting for a phone call that never comes".

It is true that a system of presumed consent, by itself, is not a cure-all for the problem of organ shortage, as the New Scientist recently noted (September 14, issue 2673). One key factor is the quality of communication between doctors and the families of potential donors, but this is clearly something that can be addressed by training. However, what is also clear is that - families aside - a system of informed consent does increase the number of individuals who are willing to allow their own organs to be used. In a Science article titled "Do defaults save lives", Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein compared the rates of consent when an opt-in or an opt-out system was used. They did this with both an online experiment and by examining statistics from various countries. In both cases, the opt-out system generated far higher rates of consent (see for example the graph below).

Readers who wish to lobby their MP about this issue can obtain details of their MP and how to contact them electronically from the website They Work for You. Act quickly: the taskforce is due to report its conclusions formally on Monday 24th November.