EU card to boost organ donor rates

THE European Union’s health chief proposed an EU-wide organ donor card yesterday after a survey showed most Europeans support using such cards but only 12% actually carry one.

The proposed card is part of a plan by EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou to increase donations and transplants.

The lack of a transplant ethos in Irish hospitals, where medical staff are unwilling to donate their own organs, is the single biggest deterrent to more lives being saved through organ donations, the head of the European Heart and Lung Transplantation Federation said.

An EU-wide survey found that over two-thirds of Irish people are willing to donate their organs, over half would consent to their relatives donating an organ and that the Irish are more likely than their European counterparts to carry organ donor cards.

However, there are 800 on the waiting list for kidneys alone and several hundred die every year waiting for a transplant.

Terence Mangan, chairman of the European Heart and Lung Transplant Federation, said some of Ireland’s top hospitals donated very few organs.

“In a three-year period some major provincial hospitals have contributed just one donor. This is down to a lack of trained personnel and a transplant ethos,” he said.

In a Nordic hospital specialising in transplants he visited recently, 78% of staff were in favour of transplants but just 42% would donate their own organs.

“I would not imagine that Irish hospitals are any different. There has to be a transplant ethos, otherwise staff reluctance feeds through the system,” he said.

Government ministers, health managers and those involved in organ transplants should give good example by carrying organ donor cards, he said.

Potential organ donations are frequently lost because trained staff are not on hand to talk to relatives; procedures to trace a suitable recipient are poor and because of cumbersome structures such as three organ retrieval teams — one each for liver, lungs and heart, and kidneys, Mr Mangan said.

Ireland needs a single transplant authority to put in place a comprehensive system covering all aspects of organ donation, including a completely transparent method of deciding who gets organs when they become available, he said.

The HSE is currently carrying out a survey into the major contributing hospitals to determine attitudes and elements preventing more organs being retrieved from willing donors.

Mr Kyprianou announced proposals yesterday to improve co-ordination between hospitals and donor organisations in the EU and to draw up a single set of quality and safety standards for organ transplants.

Large differences in organ donation and transplant rates exist within the EU, ranging from 34.6 donors per million people in Spain to about 20 in Ireland, 13.8 in the Britain, six in Greece and 0.5 in Romania.

Every day almost 10 people die in Europe while waiting for an organ.