As of June 17 this year, the Irish government under the direction of Minister of Health Jennifer Carrol-McNeill, now employs a mandatory organ donation policy. This policy means that all people resident in Ireland over the age of 18, are considered organ donors by the state when they die.
The government’s policy should promote scepticism from Irish citizens. Given that this policy manufactures the consent of the deceased, it has the potential to impact the lives of every Irish family in some manner. As such, this requires greater public engagement in the debates surrounding the positive aspects of organ donation, the new mandatory policy, as well as public concerns surrounding efficacy or possibly ethics.
Organ donation, while certainly a social good for the medically vulnerable in our society, when taken out of the hands of the individual citizen, and enforced by government policy, may encourage public backlash. The government has sought to increase the number of registered organ donors, an absolutely admirable goal, yet doing so by coercive policy methods could in-fact push individuals to opt-out in order to express political dissatisfaction.
Government policy enforcing such an important personal decision as the donation of one’s internal organs ought to be met with scepticism, and in Ireland, concern, given the repeated demonstrations of medical malpractice by the HSE. For those who are not comfortable with this new policy, there is an opt-out registry organised by the HSE.
In parts of the United States, some doctors have moved to take patients off life-support despite signs of improving consciousness, in order to harvest their organs—at the behest of organ donation non-profit groups. While in many of these cases, doctors must end the procedure before it begins due to patients experiencing sudden recoveries—there are worrying cases in which federal investigations ruled doctors should not have harvested patients’ organs due to signs of high levels of consciousness.
If the government is to continue with this organ donation policy, it must hold itself to reformation of the HSE and ensure that medical malpractice in Ireland is minimised or eliminated.
Central to the implementation of this issue in Ireland, is the lack of public trust in the health service. The HSE brings with it a wake of scandals wherever it goes, whether it be the death of a 16-year-old girl in Limerick due to medical negligence, the children’s spinal doctor scandal, or the issuing of false positive cervical cancer tests to women. In light of the conduct of our national health service in basic treatments, automatic organ donation could continue to pile weight onto our over-stretched and under-resourced health service. The natural consequence of such policies would be the diminishing quality of health care in Ireland, and even higher stakes for future medical malpractice.
Today, Ireland has one of the highest rates of medical negligence payouts in Europe as a result of subpar care, thus prompting the HSE to allocate more finances to its legal compensation budget. That this increasing rate is subtly acknowledged by our health service, and government, yet not publicly discussed should be cause for worry, and push people to maintain acute awareness of their health in an environment in which state services are unreliable.
To minimise the number of potential scandals or personal tragedies which could emerge from this new policy, citizens must determine for themselves which side of the organ donation debate they reside, while the Irish government must introduce earnest safeguards to guarantee this policy does not find itself the cause of yet another scandal at the HSE.
Max Keating