Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. What further steps is the government taking to lift organ donation rates across Australia?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her question. Earlier today there was a gathering here in Parliament House of people directly engaged in the great challenge of organ donation—those who are waiting for the donation of organs, those who are from families who have already provided organs and who know the distressed circumstances associated with that, and medical professionals who seek to support families in both circumstances as well.

As honourable members in this place will know, right across Australia as we speak today 1,800 individuals are currently on organ donation waiting lists. Because of that, the nation has a responsibility to improve the current set of arrangements which have seen our donation rates not improve for many, many years. The consequence, as I am advised by those presenting material to the gathering earlier today in parliament, is that some three Australians lose their lives each day waiting for the donation of organs to occur.

As a nation we can do better than this. For those reasons the government, at the end of last year, announced that we were going to invest $151.1 million over four years to reform the national organ and tissue donation system in order to save lives. There are five elements to this: first, $46 million to introduce a coordinated and consistent approach under the leadership of a new independent national authority, the Australian Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation Authority—this is now up and running; second, $67 million to employ trained medical specialists to work closely with emergency department and intensive care unit teams in selected public and private hospitals across Australia and other staff dedicated to organ donation; third, $17 million in new funding for hospitals to meet additional staffing, bed and infrastructure costs associated with organ donation; fourth, $13 million towards raising community awareness; and, fifth, $2 million for counsellors to support donor families.

Today, together with the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing, Senator McLucas, I announced also the composition of the 15-member advisory council, which will be headed by businessman and double lung transplant recipient Sam Chisholm. This is a good initiative, and I thank all those who are now going to be members of this advisory council for their work. It is important that we get this done right.

This is an important measure for families right across the country and, if there is one single thing which can be done this day, on the day when this council has been appointed, it is as follows: to draw home again to every family in the nation the importance of getting your organ donation records in place, to have the conversation with your family about the need for organ donation, to resolve that in advance and to make sure the records are set in order so that, if and when a tragedy arises, this current terrible shortfall in organ donation in Australia can be reduced from where it is now. So my appeal through the parliament to the nation is: let us again seize this opportunity to raise awareness across the country; let us do so through the activities of this day and week, which draw the nation’s attention to this important need to lift the overall donation rate. We will be doing our bit through the nation’s media, in a focused television advertising campaign, to get this as much as possible on people’s personal radar screens, but at the end of the day it boils down to a family conversation. Those family conversations have to be had if we are going to make a difference.

Honourable members would have seen a little girl in the media recently—and she was here with us today—named Cordelia Whatman. She is one or two years old—a tiny tot—and in the nick of time she received the procedure which she needed last year. It is wonderful to see her skipping around like a normal one- or two-year-old, and that was not really a prospect for Cordelia last year. But, you know, across the country there are 1,800 little Cordelias, and there are a number of them with us today who are still on that waiting list. So the government has acted through the parliament to establish this authority. We have provided the funding necessary to support its work, but we also need consciousness raised in each community. I would appeal to each member to do what they can in their community to lift the donation rate. It is really important to make a difference for those 1,800 Australians who, as we meet here today, are waiting for a phone call.