Interesting debate in Canada this week. The short version is this: reportedly wealthy, well-liked owner of Ottawa Senators needs urgently a liver transplant. He (well, his friends, but that's beside the point) uses his means (access to mass media) to campaign publicly for a living donor organ donation. Within a few days there's hundreds potential donors, reportedly money isn't changing hands, but who knows. The hospital where he is being prepared for surgery says that he's likely to receive his - hopefully - life preserving transplant some time this week. The transplant success rate is anywhere between 85%-90%.
Naturally the media and the usual-suspect ethicists got all fired up about rich folks 'jumping the queue' of people waiting for transplant organs, and the ethics of it all.
I thought it might be good to sort thru some of the issues here.
The Canadian Liver Foundation published an instructive background report in 2013 that I do recommend to your attention. Reportedly, in Canada, about 5,000 patients die annually while waiting for liver transplants, tendency: numbers rising. About 400 patients receive successful transplants, roughly every third patient waiting for a liver transplant dies because there are insufficient numbers of donors. Importantly, living donor donations (relatives, friends, otherwise altruistic others) don't actually affect people on the mentioned waiting lists directly, because these waiting lists are for people waiting for donations from deceased donors (ie folks who signed up to be organ donors in case of their demise) . If you manage to coax your workmate or a suitable relative into donating bits and pieces of their liver you will likely be able to live, unlike many of those who fail to do so and who keep on languishing on our waiting lists. Living donors regenerate their livers within a few months, the surgery is reportedly a relatively unproblematic, it's a low-risk procedure requiring of you to take a few weeks off work. So, it is a sacrifice, but not a major sacrifice, considering that human lives are at stake.
When you look at the Ottawa club owner's situation, it's not clear that he is guilty of any objectionable behaviour. Those folks who responded to his plea would not have donated to random others, they wanted to help him. Reportedly he is 'well liked'. Nobody stuck on a waiting list was any worse off as a result of his high-profile attempt at getting his hands on a living donor liver.
What is problematic isn't so much this individual's response, what is objectionable is a system that gives rise to such responses. While clinical need is a reasonable prioritisation and triage criterion, 'whoever shouts loudest' or is 'most likeable' are not ethically defensible selection criteria. And yet, if 'whoever shouts loudest' does not affect the existing waiting list negatively, it seems to me that there is no good reason for people not to try to 'shout loudest' given that their survival depends on it.
What ought to be criticised is the lack of available transplant organs that gives rise to such activities. Here much could be done to improve our current status quo, an immediately available strategy could be to switch our donation systems to an opt-out or presumed consent system. This is known to increase available transplant organs significantly. We should investigate the possibility of incentivising potential organ donors financially. There are various questions that need to be answered prior to implementing payments for organs, among them concerns about the exploitation of vulnerable, impoverished people as well as what the actual impact of such incentives would be on the availability of transplant organs.
