Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House:

(1)

notes with concern the low rate of organ donation in Australia;

(2)

acknowledges the plight of the more than 1,700 Australians currently on the organ transplant waiting list;

(3)

recognises the crucial role of public education in encouraging people to register as organ donors and discuss their choice with family members;

(4)

welcomes the announcement from the Australian Health Ministers’ Conference of the National Reform Agenda on organ and tissue donation; and

(5)

calls on the Federal Government to investigate the experience of other countries that have adopted an ‘opt-out’ system of organ donor registration.

This motion and my interest in the status of organ donation in Australia came about following a meeting with a family in my electorate whose life for the past six months or so has been one long, agonising wait for a phone call—the phone call that will bring the news that a donor has been found for their daughter. Kate Backhouse is a young woman of 25 who has spent her life battling cystic fibrosis. At the time her family came to see me, she had been waiting for six months for a double lung transplant. Two months on and Kate, like almost 2,000 other Australians on transplant waiting lists, is still waiting for a suitable donor to be found so that she can have the transplant she needs and get on with her life. The family’s story was a wake-up call for me. Like many Australians, I have heard the stories in the media about successful transplants and had simply assumed that organ donation is a matter of course. But that is far from the case.

Here in Australia we have one of the highest rates of success for transplant procedures but one of the lowest rates of organ donation. The rate of donation in Australia, at 10 people per year per one million head of population, is half that of countries such as the US and Italy and only one-third of that in Spain, which has the highest rate of organ donation. To give an idea of what those figures mean for the almost 2,000 people on transplant waiting lists, consider this. In 2004 there were just 218 donors in Australia. By the end of July this year 101 people had donated their organs. To express it in even more stark terms, more than one Australian dies each week waiting for a transplant.

For those Australians waiting patiently for a transplant, life can be very difficult: the long wait, the suffering in silence, never knowing if your number will come up and you will receive that second chance at life. The answer, of course, is obvious: we need more donors. But in the past that goal has proved difficult to achieve. Figures released today by Australians Donate highlight the challenge we face. They show that while 94 per cent of Australians support organ and tissue donation only 30 per cent have registered their consent to be organ donors.

One part of the solution is to encourage Australians at every opportunity to register their consent to be an organ donor by adding their name to the Australian Organ Donor Register, either online or using the form available at all Medicare offices. Five million Australians have already taken that step; however, registration is not the end of the story. Everyone I talk to in this field stresses the importance of informing your family of your wish to be a donor. If your family is not aware of your wishes, then it is quite likely that they will, understandably, not be supportive of any request for organs at such a traumatic time.

No-one knows that better than people like Debbie Austen, who works as the Organ Donor Coordinator for the Rockhampton Health Service District. I spoke to Debbie about this a few weeks ago. Part of her job is to interview the parents and family of deceased patients to see whether or not they will agree to the donation of their loved one’s organs. Her experience is consistent with figures that were printed in the Australian in July this year. The article quoted the chief executive officer of Transplant Australia, Mark Cocks, as saying that their figures show that, if the potential donor has told their loved ones of their intent to be a donor, 80 per cent of the time the family will agree to organ donation but, if they did not tell their family, the refusal rate is around 50 per cent. My conversation with Deb also brought up the role of those specialist advisers in hospitals. There is far more focus now on the job that they do.

A classic example of what needs to be done in that area comes from the Medical Journal of Australia, which reports a study done in Victoria where, of 17,000 deaths, there were 280 potential organ donors. In 60 of those cases, organ donation was not requested from relatives at the time of the potential donor’s death. There is a feeling in Australian hospitals that many potential donors are going unidentified, and the role that a specialist organ donation coordinator could play in the hospital is very important for making sure that families are approached about donation and converting potential donors to donors for those people requiring transplants. This is starting to get some attention, with $26 million in the budget this year going towards education measures and an expansion in the number of organ donor coordinators. (Time expired)

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