Donor organs going to waste

[okarol]

Donor organs going to waste
Kate Hagan
May 24, 2011
Comments 16
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GRAVELY ill Victorians are missing out on life-saving transplants because hospitals do not have the resources to take advantage of a dramatic increase in donated organs.

About 1700 Australians, including 500 in Victoria, are on the official transplant waiting list, and about 80 people die each year while waiting.

A parliamentary inquiry has been told that the number of deceased organ donors in Victoria has more than doubled in recent years, from an average of 46 a year between 2000 and 2007, to 98 last year.

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And organs have been taken from 32 deceased donors in the first three months of this year, a 60 per cent increase on the same period last year.

But Victoria's medical director of organ and tissue donation, Helen Opdam, said measures to increase organ donation had been stalled due to a resulting pressure on services.

Measures put on hold included any expansion of ''donation after cardiac death'', where the heart has stopped beating in patients not yet declared brain dead.

''Due to the current stress on the system and the risk of negative fallout from being unable to facilitate donation, it has been necessary to constrain some initiatives in order to prevent an even more rapid rise in the donation rate,'' Dr Opdam said.

She said this had meant a slow rollout of the ''donation after cardiac death'' programs, which had been functioning in only three major Victorian hospitals. Those hospitals had seen a 36 to 100 per cent increase in donations.

Alfred hospital chief executive Andrew Way told State Parliament's legal and social issues committee, which is considering options to increase organ donation, that a lack of resources to utilise donor organs was a major problem for hospitals.

''More organ retrieval, operating theatre, surgical, medical, nursing and allied health resources are urgently required to enable the Victorian system to actually translate this increase in donor organs into more quality transplants, which is ultimately the whole point of the organ donation process,'' he said.

The increase in Victorian donor organs follows a $151 million package announced in 2008 by then prime minister Kevin Rudd in a bid to raise donations, which included a campaign to boost consent rates.

Annette Clarke, 45, has been waiting 10 years for a transplant after her kidneys failed due to an illness she had in childhood. She attends hospital three times a week for dialysis, which she finds increasingly difficult.

''It's taking its toll on me. I was fairly positive in the beginning … but this just keeps going on and on … I'm just getting to the point where for my own health and sanity I'm not sure how much longer I can put up with it,'' she said.

''It costs a lot of money to have someone on dialysis … there are tons of people out there who could have a better quality of life and potentially a longer life by having a transplant. I don't want to find out that hasn't happened because they couldn't afford to have someone working that day.''

Mr Way said a single national database was needed to track all stages of the process from identification of potential donors to transplant outcomes. He said the current system of multiple databases was ''seriously deficient''. He also criticised as ''time wasting and needlessly expensive'' a requirement for medical and nursing staff from the recipient hospital to travel to the donor hospital to retrieve organs - often in privately chartered aircraft - and suggested instead that staff at donor hospitals be trained in organ retrieval.

Many submissions to the inquiry opposed a move towards ''presumed consent'' where everyone would become a potential donor unless they registered a formal objection.

The head of the federal government's organ and tissue authority, Yael Cass, said there was no international evidence that presumed consent would boost donor rates.

Transplant Australia agreed that presumed consent was not the panacea. ''However … we believe that all legislative measures should be exhausted to ensure Australia meets world's best practice.''

Last year Victoria's 98 deceased donors led to 286 people receiving transplants.



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/donor-organs-going-to-waste-20110523-1f0ui.html#ixzz1NJ90PEuy