Extended organ donor database proposed

By MARTIN JOHNSTON

The Government is investigating setting up a new computer register of people willing to donate organs when they die.

The present database is run by the Land Transport Safety Authority and available to hospital intensive care units.

Health Minister Annette King said yesterday that she had instructed officials to consider introducing a database which was still accessible by hospitals, but much more comprehensive than the authority's.

"We don't have a good database and it does restrict our ability to find suitable donors," she said.

"We have people who put 'donor' on their driver licence, but there are problems in people's wishes being observed."

She also shares the concerns of a North Shore man, whose baby will eventually need a liver transplant, that the authority's database is unable to cater for non-drivers who may wish to be donors.

Andy and Janice Tookey's 7-month-old daughter Katie suffers biliary atresia, a rare liver condition in which babies are born with insufficient ducts to drain bile.

They become jaundiced, develop cirrhosis and, at a young age, end-stage liver disease.

Katie was diagnosed at 6 weeks, after jaundice failed to clear up, and had surgery to create a duct from liver to stomach using a piece of her intestine.

"It's not a cure, but without it, life expectancy is about eight weeks," Mr Tookey said.





Katie's doctors were certain that she would need a transplant, but did not know when, so she was yet to go on the transplant waiting list, Mr Tookey said.

There are insufficient organ donors in New Zealand, where about 10 per cent of patients on the list for liver transplants die waiting.

Mr Tookey wants the transport authority's database widened to non-drivers and children, and the introduction of a donor-card system like in his native Britain.

But the National Transplant Donor Co-ordination office at Auckland Hospital is giving only limited backing to his ideas.

Co-ordinator Janice Langlands said a new database was unnecessary because using driver licences was working quite well.

The existing system could be improved by allowing drivers who changed their minds to have the switch noted on the database without issuing a new licence, which costs $31.10.

Authority spokeswoman Kate Lancaster said people could already do this, but it was better for people's photo licences to reflect their wishes in case the plastic card guided incorrectly a decision on whether or not to donate their organs.

Organs are donated from about 40 people a year after their deaths from causes such as accidents or brain haemorrhages.

This is a rate of about 10 per million of population, one of the lower rates in the world, but fractionally higher than Australia's.

Ms Langlands said it was useful though unnecessary to include non-drivers on the database because doctors were guided by families' wishes regardless of whether the patient had a licence, or what it said.

And there was no need to include children, she said, mainly because that could be done only with parental consent and the parents would be involved in any donation decisions anyway.

nzherald.co.nz/health