Proposed Legislative Competence Orders relating to Organ Donation and Cycle Paths - Welsh Affairs Committee Contents


Written evidence submitted by the Patients Association

The Patients Association has campaigned on behalf of patients for nearly 50 years. We campaign for every patient to be as informed about their healthcare and health services in order to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness.

A patient's consent to treatment is the cornerstone of care. To treat without consent is a criminal offence. We believe that patients are only able to give truly informed consent if they have full information about the clinicians and setting in which healthcare is given. We endorse the succinct statement "no decision about me without me".

Presumed consent is no consent.

Failure to gain consent has the most fundamental implications for the basis on which care is given and for the trust that must exist between individual patients and individual clinicians.

The Patients Association is acutely aware of the shortage of organs available for transplant under current NHS procedures and supports ways of increasing awareness and information about the importance of organ donation. We believe there is still some way to go to ensure that patients are fully aware of the importance of donation. We have not yet fully exploited the possibilities. There are also alternative techniques to prolong the time an organ can be available to a recipient.

It is dangerous to presume a patient's wishes at a time when difficult decisions need to be made immediately. It is not always possible to contact next-of-kin in time, so we must not take for granted that presumed consent for all is the answer.

Any failure in the current take up of donor options is no reason to do away with a patient's fundamental right to decide what happens to their own body. What is being argued is that because there is insufficient take up, for whatever reasons, the basis on which all patient care proceeds should be put at risk.

The Patients Association believes that, with increased awareness, those who choose to make this "gift" will also choose to make it known. It must be made as easy as possible for each individual to decide. We believe that it is a more constructive way to proceed which will benefit the relationship of each patient, regardless of their level of empowerment, with their clinician.

Transplant surgery is one aspect, and an important one, of the whole of healthcare and the services available to patients. We do not believe it has been argued successfully that its needs should override and risk damaging the relationship of patient and doctor in other branches of medicine.

We repeat—presumed consent is no consent.

February 2011



 
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