SOME, if not all, the Wiltshire people who have died in the past five years waiting for organ transplants in the county would be alive today if there was a different system for donations.
Lucy Ryan is among many who want to see Britain adopt a policy of automatic registration for donation, but with a “soft optout”
provision. She is concerned that unless things change more people will die because the number of people donating organs is falling.
Lucy, who was herself a recipient of heart transplant just before her third birthday, knows only too well that she has already gained 19 extra years of quality life from the kindness of someone else. But as medical procedures have advanced, the opportunities to use such expertise to save or improve lives have become proportionately less.
Lucy has launched her a petition for the government to bring about the change.
She points to the action of the Welsh parliament, which will bring in the “soft optout”
option in December.
She is calling on people to join her in signing the petition, which she wants to see rise to 2,000 during next week’s Transplant Awareness Week.
A simple request you might think and one that might be a small step towards alleviating the plight of 102 people currently on the county’s transplant waiting list.
Dr Christiaan Bernard, the man who pioneered heart-transplant surgery, had a different way of putting it: “It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it to be devoured by worms.”
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