Department of Health says compulsory question about donation is aimed at giving people more opportunities to sign up
Anyone applying for a driving licence from Monday will be obliged to answer a question about joining the organ donor register, the health department has announced, in an attempt to boost the numbers of potential donors.
Those applying for a licence online will be obliged to tick one of three boxes about the register as a condition of completing the form.
They can say they would like to sign up there and then, that they are already on the register or that they would like to think about it on another occasion.
A similar question existed previously but it was optional and many applicants missed or ignored it.
The change is the latest salvo in a long-running campaign by the Department of Health to increase the number of organ donors, which currently stands at about 18 million ? 29% of the population.
While the numbers signing up has risen significantly in recent years, they are not keeping pace with an ever-increasing demand for transplants, caused in part by less healthy lifestyles ? for example, adult-onset diabetes with associated kidney failure.
The previous Labour government considered the idea of presumed consent, in which people would have to actively opt out if they did not wish to donate organs after their death.
However, a consultation taskforce concluded in 2008 (pdf) that it would be possible to instead significantly increase the rate of donation under existing laws.
Monday's change, involving licence applications in England, Scotland and Wales, is a key part of this, given that about half of the approximately 1m new names on the organ donation register every year currently come through driving licence applications.
The intention, said Chris Rudge, national clinical director for transplantation at the Department of Health, was to give people as many opportunities as possible to sign up.
"From various polls and surveys we know two things: one, virtually everybody in the country would accept an organ transplant if they needed one to save their own life; but we also know that a very large majority ? probably of the order of 90% ? are in favour of donating organs after death," he said.
"There's a variety of reasons why they don't put their name on the organ donor register, but by far the most common is they just don't get round to it."
If the change to the driving licence form brought in significantly more donors, similar questions could be added in the future to other official online forms, Rudge said.
"But I think we have to be a little bit cautious about not barraging people with this. If people are continually asked the same question, over and over again, you get irritated by it."
More than 7,500 people are awaiting an organ transplant and an average of three die every day, according to the NHS Blood and Transplant service.
Ahead of Transplant Week earlier this month, the service released figures showing that, despite the bigger pool of potential donors, patients face increasingly long delays, with the average wait for a new kidney rising 20% over three years.
The department is particularly keen to boost donor register membership among black and Asian communities, which comprise less than 2% of the register but more than a quarter of those awaiting transplants.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/31/driving-licence-organ-donor-register
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