According to research published online in BMJ Open, numbers and types of organ donation vary greatly in all four UK countries.
Researchers examined data from NHS Blood & Transplant for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales from 1990 to 2009 and compared findings to registration data and donation data from other European countries. They also looked for differences in the UK’s four countries to establish a possible trend for organ types by evaluating donation rates for kidney, heart, lung, liver and cornea per million of the population.
Their findings revealed that for most of the past 20 years Welsh organ donation rates have been higher compared with average rates in the UK and that Wales steadily performed better in terms of the percentage of people registered and its organ donation rates.
England, with its third highest number of the population registered, only achieved a higher than average organ donation rate in three years during the last 2 decades, whereas Northern Ireland despite having the lowest donor registration of all four countries, performed better than England and Scotland in terms of organ donation rates.
Organ donation rates in Scotland have fallen over the past 20 years whilst rates in England have remained relatively steady.
Comparisons between all countries also showed substantial differences regarding organ types donated, such as liver donations, with Wales and Northern Ireland having substantially more heart donations than England.
The investigators discovered that over the last 2 decades England, Scotland and Wales saw a decrease in heart donations, whereas the rate of lung donations has risen since 1990 with Northern Ireland being the largest contributor during most of this period.
They indicate that compared with other organs heart and lung donations have been few in all four countries. This may be explained due to the steadily decreasing number of living donors, as most heart and lung transplants depend on living donors.
Although rates for kidney and cornea donations balanced out over time, cornea donations in Northern Ireland have been substantially lower over the last two decades which the authors believe may be due to culture and tradition and also the fact that Northern Ireland has no eye bank or eye retrieval center.
In the UK, where increasing demands for organ donations are not met by supply, introducing a system of presumed consent (unless otherwise specified) has been proposed in order to increase organ donor rates. The authors however remain skeptical, as other European countries have shown mixed results where a similar legislation has been implemented. In a concluding statement they write: “Comparison of EU nations, and particularly Spain, indicates that improvement of organ donation rates is unlikely to be achieved by introducing new legislation alone.”
Written by Petra Rattue