Did you know?
- Over 110,000 children and adults are currently on the waiting list to receive a life-saving or life-altering donor organ in the United States.
- They won't always get the organ they need on time — in fact, an average of 20 people die every day because no suitable donor organ was found in time.
- Less than one percent of people who die meet the criteria to be an organ donor, but those who do meet the criteria can save up to eight lives with their gift. A total of 39,000 life-saving organ transplants were carried out in the United States in 2020.
- Over 90 percent of the adult US population supports organ donation, but only 60 percent is actually registered as a donor!
In the last couple of years, research has confirmed, organ transplants have seen a sharp decline as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This worrying trend has been linked to a lower number of viable donor organs due to COVID-19, but also to the fact that global healthcare systems have been so overwhelmed that they have had to focus on providing emergency care to coronavirus patients.
How can this problem be fixed, so that more patients, who have in some cases been on the waiting list for years and getting by on a very poor quality of life with the help of assistive technologies like dialysis can finally have access to new organs — to the marvel of modern medicine?
Several scientific studies, including a paper titled The Society, the Barriers to Organ Donation and Alternatives for a Change, shed important light on the matter. We hope that, after reading this, you go sign up to be an organ donor, if you have not already taken this step!
Why Is There a Shortage of Donor Organs? Why Don't More People Decide to Become Organ Donors?
Not everyone who wants to be an organ donor can be one — strict criteria have to be met, and if your tissues are not healthy, they won't be able to give the gift of life to someone else. That's one obstacle, of course, but a bigger problem is that not every potential health organ donor agrees to donate their organs. And, in the case of an unexpected death, if the person themselves has not already registered as an organ donor, their suddenly bereaved next of kin is left to make that choice. That's often an unwanted discussion, met with a negative response because relatives are still in a state of shock.
Research has identified five primary barriers to organ donation:
- Members of the public don't really consider organ donation in their daily lives, and are not very aware of the fact that medical science has perfected organ transplant procedures to the point that it's now fairly straightforward to predict success rates.
- Society's always been about give and take, and people fail to consider that they, themselves, may need a donor organ at some point. They've heard organ donation discussed only as the gift of life; something you offer someone else.
- A lack of societal recognition of death as a "source of life", in the form of organ donation.
- A lack of training on the part of medical professionals.
- Primal fears relating to death and the body after death, some of which are religious in nature. Social fears that donor organs will be distributed mostly to rich people, spurred on by media stories about black markets in donor organs.
How Can the Donor Organ Shortage Be Fixed?
The answer is multifaceted.
Public health campaigns informing people of the importance of organ donation can certainly play a part. Primary care doctors and other medical professionals should also bring organ donation up as a matter of course, to normalize the practice before a patient finds themselves in crisis mode.
Offering some sort of financial incentive has also been proposed as a possible solution to the shortage in donor organs, but has thus far been considered unethical, as organ donation is meant to be strictly altruistic.
A further solution might lie in accepting "suboptimal" donors; people who want to donate, but who have health problems of some kind. This would potentially include donors with diabetes, hypertension, and even hepatitis C.
You Can Play Your Part!
You may one day need a life-saving donor organ yourself. Someone you love deeply might. In either of these scenarios, chances are that you'd be eternally grateful if the right donor showed up. You don't need your body anymore after you die — but it can continue to benefit up to eight other people for the rest of their lives.
If you'd want your son, mother, partner, or best friend to have access to a life-saving organ transplant, you'd likely wish the same for other people's loved ones. You have nothing to lose, and every single donor counts.