| News From Transplant Week of March 10, 2002 / Vol. 3 No. 10 |
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Many Intensive Care Units in UK "Rarely or Never" Retrieve Organs |
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The head of the British Medical Association's medical ethics committee said more than one-quarter of 300 intensive-care units in the United Kingdom "rarely or never" retrieve organs from potential cadaver donors because of a lack of hospital facilities. Dr Michael Wilks said intensive care staff were not offering the families of patients the opportunity to donate organs for transplantation "mainly because of the acute shortage of intensive-care beds in our hospitals. "Doctors are being forced to make impossible choices: maintain a brain-dead patient on a life-support machine so he may be considered for organ donation, or free up the bed for a very sick patient in casualty," Wilks said. The result is that organs are retried from only about one third of the 3,000 potential donors who die in intensive care each year, according to officials. "There is an urgent need to change the whole organ-donation infrastructure in this country," Wilks added. Other sources: The Scotsman |
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