Top Organ Donation Drive in India Led by Youngsters

The introduction of the bill will certainly make us introspect about the current situation with a deceased donation in the country. The purpose as he said is to increase the donation rates. India's organ donation rates at less than one per million populationare of great concern, especially with its high road traffic accident rates. Lakhs of people are dying every year waiting for a life- saving donor organ.
Organ donation in India has been heavily reliant on living donors so far and a change in policy would encourage optimal utilization of the potential brain dead donors. Currently, India follows an opt-in system that allows any adult above the age of 18 yearsto voluntarily register themselves as organ donors if they wish to donate organs after their death. However, it is generally believed that a lack of awareness about organ donation and failure to communicate a willingness to the family has resulted in very few donations taking place in the country. Under the presumed consent scheme all adult citizens are deemed to be organ donors after death and can choose to opt-out from donating. Countries like Spain and Croatia,which follow the opt-out system have highly encouraging rates of 46.9 and 38.6 per million respectively. England has also recently adopted the presumed consent system effective since May 2020. This was following the success witnessed by Wales, which chose to shift to opt-out in 2015 and has seen a rise in consent rates from 58 percent to 75 percent.The United States which follows opt-in has also been deliberating a shift in policy.While a few experts around the world are still debating if opting out of presumed consent is the most effective way to overcome organ shortage,there are others who are of the view that this process of consent is infringement by the state on an individual's rights. The proposed bill will certainly open up a debate on this subject; however, it isunlikely to be taken further, given the complexity of the subject and India's differential health infrastructure which would not allow anyone who is brain dead in a village to become an organ donor. In India, the healthcare infrastructure is so variable and disparate. The smaller hospitals lack both infrastructure and manpower. Even the larger public sector hospitals in some of the bigger cities do not have the facilities for brain death conversion. The added problem is that most of our healthcare needs, including transplants, are being provided by private hospitals and this has caused the loss of equity as far as care is concerned and slowly resulted in the erosion of trust. In smaller towns and villages there is no possibility of even eye donation, leave alone organ donation. Spain, which is often lauded for the highest donation rate in the world, had improvement in its donation rate for ten years after passage of the presumed consent or opt-out system. The improvement came about only after proper systems were set up in intensive care units (ICU) for brain death identification, certification and maintenance. The architect of this change was Dr.RMartinez whohas often confessed that it was not the presumed consent that worked in increasing the donation rate,but the systems that were set up in the ICU's that have helped increase the donation rate in Spain.In fact, there is no opt-out register as such in Spain and consent from family is still warranted before donations take place.