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?

Benefits of Live Donation

A heart-warming story about an 'altruistic' (or live) kidney donor receiving a letter of thanks from the family she helped here. It's good to see donation get regular good press, rather than only being covered when there are scandals.

For the record, the scare quotes round 'altruistic' in the first sentence are not intended to question Ms Pretty's obvious altruism; rather, I find it odd that live donors who donate to strangers (rather than relatives) are referred to as 'altruistic donors', given the commonplace belief that all donations should be altruistic - a reasoning which is often appealed to in order to resist incentives for donors.

If you're interested in this issue, there's a nice piece by Greg Moorlock discussing the altruism requirement in the Journal of Medical Ethics (open access). The next meeting of the RSE project, on Saturday 14th September, will focus on incentives and inducements, so look out for further posts on that theme.

The Role of the Family

Just 3-4 weeks ago we (that is, members of my RSE project on organ donation) were discussing the role of the family in decisions over donation - for instance whether next of kind should be able to override the wishes of the deceased individual (in either direction). Now it's national news!

RSE Project featured in The Herald

Monday's event on the role of the family in donation decisions is mentioned here. What's not so clear from this brief piece is that the family can override the deceased's wishes in either an opt in or an opt out system. This piece may come across as concerned with an objection to an opt out system, which is not the intention.

UK Donor Increase

Organ donation is in the news today. Since the Organ Donation Taskforce, which reported in 2008, there's been a significant increase in the number of registered donors and, consequently, in the number of transplants performed.

This is welcome news, but it shouldn't blind us to the fact that demand still exceeds supply, with three people dying each day in the United Kingdom because of a lack of transplant organs (figure from the BBC article, linked above). It's important to consider ways in which we might continue to do even better, including for instance an opt-out system.

It's also notable that, according to the first article, "Last year, 125 families overruled an individual's intention to donate". The UK's present system allows relatives of the deceased to override his/her expressed wishes. Whether this is justifiable or not ought, I think, to be more debated. It's an issue that we intend to examine in the next RSE workshop.

First Project Meeting

The RSE-funded project on Organ Donation and Transplantation Policy officially began last month. Since the plan is to use this blog to document and publicise developments, I thought I'd mention that the first meeting of collaborators takes place this Saturday (6th April) at the University of Stirling. This meeting hasn't been widely advertised, since it is largely for collaborators to meet, get to know each other, and plan for future workshops - nonetheless, if anyone reading would like to attend then please get in touch with me.

CFP: Panel at ALSP 2013 conference

Further to the general Call For Papers, I am organising a panel on Organ Donation and Transplantation Policy at the 2013 ALSP conference, which takes place on 24th and 25th June at the University of Stirling.

Interested parties working on related topics – such as medical consent, family vetoes, nudges and incentives, etc applied to organ donation – are invited to submit abstracts to the conference in the usual manner, indicating (in the abstract and not simply in the email) that they wish to be considered for this panel. (Submissions in other areas are, of course, still welcome; the panel will only run during parallel sessions.)

This panel forms part of a project supported by a workshops grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Thanks to this grant, a limited number of panel members will be offered a subsidy towards the usual costs of registration and accommodation at the conference. This subsidy will be no more than 50% of those costs (possibly less) and does not include travel. No one will be expected to register before costs and details of any subsidy are confirmed; those who we cannot subsidise are still welcome to attend at their own expense (and to present, if their abstract is accepted).

Proposals for papers or panels in other areas falling under the conference theme are still welcome; please see the original call (linked above) or website.

Welcome

This blog is intended as a forum for discussing organ policy and issues of medical ethics more generally. It belongs to Dr Ben Saunders, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling. I've been blogging in a personal capacity since 2005 - over seven years now I realise - and often comment on matters of interest in the news. This new blog marks an attempt to keep comments on one particular area of interest together.

It's intended that this blog will tie in with a workshops grant I was recently awarded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh to investigate Organ Donation and Transplantation Policy. This grant begins in March 2013. I hope, then, to report on the discussions in those workshops and, if possible, involve some of my collaborators. In the meantime, this will be a repository for thoughts and news items on the issue. Comments very welcome!