Organ Donation 101
We need not reinvent the wheel here. Just follow global best practices. Its good that the media has brought up recent cases of successful and unsuccessful organ transplants. The high visibility should be followed through with concrete steps.
1) As per Chua Soi Lek's statements, the government must make the necessary amendments to the Human Tissue Act and Medical Act to ensure family members cannot object to an organ donor's pledge.
2) The most effective way is registering with National Transplant Resource Center (03-2694-2704)
3) Make all driving licenses to have a declaration for wanting to be an organ donor, clearly PRINTED on their licenses. It makes for immediate identification by police, doctors, ambulance drivers, nurses and other relevant parties. All organ pledgers data registered via the Malaysian driving license would immediately be shared and linked to the National Transplant Resource Center's database. Donors who wished to change their pledge will have to have new licenses, failing to do that will mean all pledges will be honoured by the donor as per the existing driving license.
4) Other people especially non-drivers will have to be contacted and engaged via other means.
In Australia, the NSW state has me as Donor A, which is clearly printed on my driving license, which indicates that I am OK with donating all my organs. There are other options as well if you choose to donate only certain organs (save my dick, save my dick... I can hear some yelling to their graves!!!). Doing it via driving licenses is very effective.
As insensitive as this may sound, every Hari Raya ops or Chinese New Year ops will see hundreds of deaths - if even half were registered organ donors, we could make something "good" to come out from these tragedies. Its a bizarre and sickening thought , but its the reality - I don't think we can stop road accidents (we can only try to lessen them) esp during these congested days, so let's try to make something "good" come out of them.
Successful organ and tissue donation has meant the possibility of life and health to many people in our community. Organ transplants are only possible when people generously decide that in the event of their death they would like to donate their organs to help others.
Australia - Australian Health Ministers, supported by the Australian Transport Council, reached agreement to set up a nationally based accessible information system that identifies people willing to be organ donors on their driver licences. Consequently, the Road Transport Authority is trialing a scheme where it transfers details of its organ donor data to the Health Insurance Commission to form part of the Australian Organ Donor Register. In the meantime the RTA, HIC and Lifelink in NSW are working together to reach an agreement on the future of the current arrangements. All Australian States are participating in the arrangement. The ACT and the Northern Territory are not involved because they do not have donor data recorded on driver licences.
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