It’s hard to overstate the complexity that surrounds organ donation, both clinically and psychologically. Add to that the need to move quickly, sometimes with little advanced warning, and it becomes clearer why historically fewer than 50 percent of US organ donation candidates actually donated.
To address this, in September 2003 the US Health Resources and Services Administration, Division of Transplantation, launched the Organ Donation Collaborative, modeled on IHI’s Breakthrough Series Collaborative. The idea, says Collaborative Director Dennis Wagner, MPA, was to widely spread best practices for obtaining consent from families for organ donation. This and subsequent Collaboratives have fundamentally changed the way families are approached for consent, resulting in unprecedented new levels of organ donation.
In 2004, organ donation increased by a record 10.8 percent across the nation, and by another seven percent through the first nine months of 2005. These back-to-back increases are unparalleled in the history of the field, and have already resulted in an estimated 3,000 additional life-saving and life-enhancing transplants.
Now the focus includes increasing the number of organs transplanted per donor from the current average of three. “Every donor has the potential to save or enhance eight lives,” says Wagner. “We’d like to see that become the norm.”
More Information
Learn more about efforts to improve organ donation:
Spreading the Gift of Life: Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative
Finding the Right Opportunities in the Right Places: A New Model for Organ Donation
01/16/2006
