ABSTRACT
While organ transplantation (e.g. kidneys, heart, lungs, liver) can be life-saving, increasingly many tissues (e.g. eyes, skin, bone, heart valves) can be retrieved to improve recipients’ quality of life. Up to 50 people may now be helped by a single donor. For more than a decade, numbers of donors and donated organs have been essentially static, while numbers living and dying on waiting lists for organs have continued to increase. Numbers of patients needing transplants in the UK are expected to continue to rise (Long and Sque, 2007). The UK has the lowest transplant rate in Europe (DH, 2008b), so each UK Trust now has a Senior Nurse Organ Donation (SNOD) and Clinical Lead Organ Donation (CLOD), with the aim of increasing organ donation by 50 per cent by 2013 (DH, 2008b). There is also the national ‘Organ Donation Tsar’ – currently (2011), Chris Rudge. This chapter focuses on organ donation; tissue donation is discussed in more detail in Moore and Woodrow (2009).
