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The impending “opt-out” system for organ donation in England may fail to boost transplant rates and could even lead to a fall in such life-saving operations.
Under the new rules, set to be introduced in 2020, everyone will be assumed to consent to donating their organs after death, unless they have proactively signed a register to say they object.
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At the moment, England has an opt-in approach, where people sign up to say they give consent. But under both systems, families are still given the final say. They are usually asked to give permission for donation after their relative has been declared brain-dead and is being supported on a ventilator in hospital.
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Magda Osman of Queen Mary University of London and colleagues wanted to find out how the new opt-out system would affect families’ decisions, so they asked nearly 1300 people from the US and Europe to complete a survey. It included a range of questions about what people thought a hypothetical person’s wishes would be about donating a relative’s organs after death, under different rules.
Active choice
People were more certain that their injured relative really wanted to donate their organs if they had signed up under the opt-in system, than if they had been presumed to consent under the opt-out system. “People don’t think their relative wants to donate unless they’ve actively chosen to sign up,” says Osman.
In Wales, an opt-out system was introduced in 2015. There were slightly fewer cases of organ donation the following year, dropping from 64 to 61.
At the moment about 100 families in the UK a year veto organ donation taking place despite their relative having signed up to the organ donation register, about 7 per cent of the those who are asked.
Journal reference: Journal of Experimental Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/xap0000183
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