Fewer and fewer organ donors in Germany

Fewer and fewer people are willing to make themselves available as an organ donor

12/11/2013

The number of people who opt for organ harvesting after their deaths has been falling since 2010. This year, according to the German Foundation for Organ Transplantation, the readiness has reached a new negative record.

For patients who are on the waiting list for a much-needed organ, the long waiting times have sometimes fatal consequences. Thus, in 2013 so far only 754 people have decided to donate organs. In the same period last year, there were still 892. This corresponds to a decrease of 15.5 percent, as the foundation announced on Tuesday at its annual meeting.

Since it became known in the past year that it had come to a number of patient data manipulation, the trust of many people in the organ donor system is destroyed. At that time, doctors from Munich, Regensburg and Göttingen had purposely made false statements about the disease course of their patients in order to get a life-saving organ faster. For months, a monitoring and monitoring commission within the 24 liver transplantation programs had searched for suspicious cases and found 25 serious guideline violations at the University Hospital of Münster, according to a report by the examiners from September. According to the DSO, a total of 2647 organs were donated in the last 12 months. This corresponds approximately to the average of the years 1995 to 1999. Taken were heart, liver, lungs or kidneys, sometimes also several organs of one person.

Transplant registry should ensure quality
In order to rebuild people's trust, numerous campaigns have been conducted, albeit with limited success. Most had little influence on people's decision to donate their organs after their deaths. But even before it became known that it had come to manipulation, according to statistics, three people died every day, who urgently needed a donor organ. Currently there are 11,300 people on the waiting list for a suitable organ.

Unannounced exams should help
In order to prevent further attempts at manipulation, transplantation centers should be regularly reviewed unannounced in the future. Every transplant should now be checked by three doctors, depending on their urgency. In order to bring together expertise, some transplantation centers will be closed and in order for the DSO to have a stronger public policy focus, the Board of Directors will be restructured. Recently, representatives of federal and state governments, doctors and lawyers are also involved in important decisions. A transplant registry, in which the data of the donors and recipients are recorded anonymously, is intended to provide information, among other things, on how far the recipient could live without complications. "The introduction of a transplant registry will make the quality of transplants in Germany assessable and comprehensible and thus significantly improve the chances of survival of patients," said DSO board member Rainer Hess in Berlin. "We have to use this existing potential, and the years of life of many thousands of patients depend on that." Such a transplant registry can also provide information on the quality of a transplant center in the future and comparisons between national and international centers can thus be better carried out. It remains to be seen how quickly and to what extent these measures will restore citizens' trust in organ donation. (Fr)

Image: Dieter Schütz