4th Workshop: Consent

The fourth and final meeting as part of the current RSE workshops project will take place on Wednesday 5th February. The theme will be consent (or authorisation, as it is in Scots law) and the schedule is as follows: Paper 1. Ben Saunders (Stirling) ‘Should Willingness to Receive be Understood as Consent to Give?’ Paper 2. Barbara Neades (Napier) ‘Consent/Authorisation in Scottish Legislation’ Paper 3. Hugh McLachlan (Glasgow Caledonian) ‘Posthumous Organ Retrieval, Consent and Justification’ Paper 4. Henrietta Consolo (Glasgow) ‘Consent and Best Interests of the Patient in Controlled Donation after Circulatory Death’ Roundtable. What have we learned from the project as a whole? Future collaboration possibilities?

Womb Transplants in Sweden

The BBC reports that nine women have received womb transplants in Sweden. I'm not clear from the story whether this is a first or not. It mentions that womb transplants have been attempted before but failed to produce babies; the implicature I take it is that the transplant itself was successful. But these nine women haven't yet had babies either, so it's not clear what advance - if any - this is over the previous attempts. Still, if they are able to carry a baby (conceived through IVF), this transplant could apparently aid 15,000 women in the UK. It's unclear where that many wombs would come from though - these were apparently donated by living relatives, I don't know whether wombs can be taken from deceased donors.

Behavioural Insights

The Cabinet Office Behavioural Insight Team recently published preliminary results of a randomised control test looking at the effect of different messages on donor registration: their report can be found here (1.2MB pdf). They found that a message stressing reciprocity had the greatest effect on increasing registrations. Interestingly, putting a picture of a group of people alongside an appeal resulted in fewer registrations that a message without a picture.