An independent report looking at ways to boost transplant rates recommends making information about organ donations publicly available but steps away from the controversial proposal to make citizens opt-out of automatic donation.
Australia’s rate of donation stands at 16.7 people in every million, well short of the 25 per million target set for 2018. Between January and November last year a total of 381 donations took place, representing a slight dip on the previous year’s figures.
The rural health minister, Fiona Nash, said while progress had been made on boosting Australia’s donation rate, which is low by western standards, there was room for improvement.
“In Australia, we worship our sporting stars and we rightly honour our war heroes, with memorials bearing their names,” the minister said. “Organ donors are real heroes who save lives. Let’s admire organ donors with the same passion we admire stars in sport or music or whatever our particular interest is.
“I think as a nation we need to lift the level of discussion around this. I think we should all think about being an organ donor. I’m an organ donor, and I’m encouraging everyone to think about it and to make that decision.
“If the family knows of their loved one’s wishes, there’s a 91% chance that organ donation will happen. If the discussion hasn’t happened, if somebody isn’t registered [on the Australian organ donor register], only 47% of those organ donations go ahead.”
Approximately 1.8 million Australians have signed up to the register. Advocates of organ donation want more public awareness of the register to help increase the number of Australians signing up.
“In the same way that society supports and honours a person’s decision in their will, we would like to see the entire transplant community honour a person’s decision to be on the register,” said the chairman of Transplant Australia, Jason Ryan. “So if a person is on the register, then we honour their decision.”
Nash said a one-step online registration process to record people’s decisions to donate their organs was expected to start in May.
The independent report, commissioned by Nash in June last year, recommends that information relating to organ donations be broken down according to state and territory and individual hospitals and be published for public consumption.
It also recommends the monitoring of training for intensive care unit workers and other specialists on how to approach families about donating the organs of their loved ones.
Overhauling the auditing requirements of organ donation and publishing data on state and territory funding for the practice are other proposals on the table.
The Coalition allocated $10.2m to boosting donation rates in the 2014 federal budget but no new money has been set aside to meet the report’s recommendations.
“There’s been no funding discussed at this point in time,” Nash said. “Some might be necessary for these changes. Some [proposals] might need legislative change.”
The report steps back from the controversial measure of requiring people who do not want to be donors to opt-out of automatic donation, a proposal put forward by the former prime minister Kevin Rudd.
Ryan said the opt-out option could trigger negativity about organ donation.
“We are concerned that it is akin to the government owning your organs,” he said. “We think that there is more compelling evidence to show that donation rates can increase when we bring to it a gift of life, that people make the decision to leave that legacy in the future. We think there’s a better chance of increasing rates with that process rather than opt-out.”
The report was critical of the Organ and Tissue Authority, citing its lack of strategic oversight, succession planning and mentoring of the chief executive officer.
