By
Richard Clark
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Change will allow patients on life support to donate after
The University Medical Center will be one 45 hospitals in the country to change their organ donor policy to allow more patients to donate their organs.
The new protocol applies only to patients who are being kept alive by life support to donate organs when cardiac death occurs after being completely disconnected from life support.
Before the protocol change patients had to be declared brain dead before organs could be removed.
The definition of cardiac death is when the heart and breathing cease for five minutes, said Dr. Kenneth Iserson, chairman of the UMC bioethics committee and author of the protocol.
The protocol change is a good, but not very significant to alleviating the donor shortage, said Greg Loeben, head of the bioethics program at Midwestern University in Mesa. "Nationally there is a change in this direction - UMC is taking a good step."
Across the country only 61 organ donations occurred last year under the new policy, Iserson said.
Last year, there were 10,538 total organ donors in the nation, stated the United Network for Organ Donation Web site, which oversees the national database of patients in need of transplants.
In the first half of this year, there were 37 organ donors in Arizona, said Sara Pace Jones, spokeswoman for the Donor Network of Arizona.
Brain death is listed as the cause of death in 99 percent of all organ donations but only accounts for 2 percent of all deaths.
The new policy may make it easier for families to make a decision about disconnecting a family member from life support because they know some good can come from the situation, she said.
While any hospital with surgical facilities can remove organs for donation, the UMC is the only hospital in southern Arizona where transplants can be performed.
The new protocol will not go into effect for another six weeks to allow time for UMC and the Donor Network of Arizona to train their personnel on how the new procedure will work.
