Consumer Health Forums

Currently the system for retrieving donor organs is an opt in system, not only that if you carry a donor card your relatives can still say no as they are asked, and it is their consent that is considered paramount.

There has been and still is ongoing debates that we should go over to an opt out system, where while you are alive you should register your objections to your organs being used for transplantation.

In this country we have huge amounts of people waiting for donor organs, and most of those organs necessarily have to be cadaver donations, i.e hearts, lungs, liver as we all only have a single such organ.

The main types of living donations are kidney, blood and bone marrow. We can all live with just one kidney, and blood and bone marrow renew themselves fairly quickly.

So what do you think about transplantation, and how should the consent for this be done.

Despite everything we as a family have been through I am still undecided, I swing from one view to the other, I do believe that some on who has signed the organ donor card, or put their name on the database, should have his or her wishes adhered to, but it would be much easier if people spoke to each other about this, but of course speaking about death is very much taboo in our society. so how do we overcome this?

Then of course there is the problem if more donors came forward would the NHS be able to cope? The NHS seems to barely cope with the load that it has at the moment.

Whilst I choose to opt in, and carry a donor card with me, there's something unnerving about the state having an automatic right to take your body. It seems unethical and I think we already have enough of a "nanny state" culture as it is. This would be a personal afront to civil liberties.

Also, this "opt out" scheme doesn't seem to have been thought through properly at all. For a start, how would a hospital know if somebody had opted-out? Don't forget this government lost another 600,000 records of military personnel on a laptop, this shortly after losing 25 million names and bank accounts.

The government could not run a bath.

The logical answer to the problem of lack of donors, would be for the government to come up with an imaginative way to encourage people to become donors, not forcing them in to it and helping themselves to your organs.

"Opt out" is just another term for mob rule.

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True, this being the biggest problem with anything that happens on large computerised databases. However the example of the Spanish system seems to have a lot going for it, they theoretically have the "Opt out" system, but they still ask the relatives and only if the relatives are trully in agreement do they go ahead. The Spanish with what appears to be amazing forsight have put in place more transplant co-ordinators, made available more beds and trained and employ more transplant surgeons and nursing staff, so that they are able to utilise every organ that becomes available with the consentof the nearest and dearest of the donors. The Spanish waiting lists are astonishingly low.

In the UK even if we had the transplant co-ordniators in place to talk to relatives of all potential donors, we do not have the surgeons nor the facilities, beds and nurses to cope, so here in the UK we will have to go on letting people die while they are on the waiting lists, and others will get too ill while on the waiting list to ever benefit from a transplant, these people are taken off the list, for instance you come of the list for six months if you become so anaemic and need to be given a blood transfusion. Even young people die or their outlook becomes more and more dim, as things secondary to their failing or failed organs start to make themselves felt.

Maybe we just expect too much from our health service I do not claim to know any of the answers, all I know is that when my daughters transplant failed we were given so much hope, she was young she was still in relatively good health, even though her bones were crumbling and her joints were painful from the many years of steroids to help keep rejection at bay. But now 4 years on there is little chance that she will ever go back on the transplant list, because she has probably gone past the stage where a transplant would ever be considered.

So what hope all those young productive people who may need a transplant, there are many people on dialysis who still work, and try to have some sort of normal life, but from my observations these are few, and from my observation its watching people getting so ill on dialysis. Yet every now and then you see the miracle, when some one you know gets the call that there is a kidney available, and then you see them a few months down the line and see how they have changed, and how grateful the recipients are. Its a pity that so many organs go to waste, and I am not talking about those who really did not want to give, but people whos names are on the register, and people who carry a donor card, but because there is no transplant co-ordinator around, or there is no surgeon available, that gift is not taken up.

I am still fairly ambivalent about the whole issue of transplantation, there always seems so many things to get upset about within the health service. You might think that because of my history I would be totally in favour but seriously I am not even sure if it is the best use of scarce resources, but its cheaper than some one being on haemodialysis.

I don't like the idea of someone coming and taking my organs when I die, they're mine. I might feel different if I was allowed to give blood but some genius decided to change the law so that people who suffer black outs can't donate, this is despite the fact that we're not contagious. If I can't give blood when I'm alive and willing why should I give organs when I'm dead and unable to protest? Surely whatever prevented me from giving blood ought to prevent me from donating something else.

The most painful thing was watching a kid I knew from dancing face leukaemia, every one of us teachers took the test and signed onto the register, I was a close match and signed the forms to say I would donate if nothing else came up soon only to be told they weren't going to harvest from me anyway, she was 5. She got forced to wait for 4 more months for a donor from the register when she had a visitor come every week with just the cells she needed and someone who wanted to give.

I don't have anything she can catch, I'm young, fit and reasonably healthy. I've had health professionals sigh at the insanity of it all but I can't donate while I'm alive, not even to save a 5 year old from 4 months of chemo she didn't have to go through.

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