Surgeons favour pay for live organ donors

Surgeons favour pay for live-organ donors
23 June 2003
By GRANT FLEMING

Paying live-organ donors $10,000 to cover costs and ease suffering would bolster New Zealand's low donation rates, transplant surgeons say.

Liver transplant unit director Professor Stephen Munn said about 350 New Zealanders were waiting for an organ transplant. New Zealand has one of the lowest organ donation rates in the developed world.
Though most donations came from brain-dead accident victims in hospital intensive care units the bulk of patients were waiting for a kidney, which could easily be transplanted from a live donor with little danger and few adverse effects.

But under the present system live donors were not reimbursed their travel costs or for time spent off work recovering after the operation.

Professor Munn said he had surveyed transplant surgeons and kidney specialists last month and most had supported paying people $5000 to reimburse their costs and another $5000 as a "slight inducement" to encourage them to donate.

"They would get paid for their suffering and costs and a little more for a noble act that was good for the community. . . We believe it would be worthwhile to look at this kind of scheme very closely."
Donations would still be limited to family and friends, with charities and the Government contributing to payment. Similar schemes overseas had been successful in lifting donation rates, Professor Munn said.
While waiting for a kidney transplant patients need dialysis which costs up to $60,000 a year.
Surgeons perform about 50 live kidney transplants a year in New Zealand and have so far performed two live liver transplants - an operation where a slice of healthy liver is removed from the donor and transplanted to regenerate in the sick patient.

Health Ministry spokesman Colin Feek said the issue would be looked at under a ministry review of the Human Tissue Act, but at face value it did not support paying donors.
"Our view is that any form of payment for live donors' loss of earnings . . . could be seen as payment for giving an organ." It was better to focus on lifting the donation rate of people who die in hospital ICUs. Any proposal on paying donors would have to be referred to an ethics committee, he said.

Otago School of Medicine's professor of medical ethics Grant Gillett said he saw no ethical problems in reimbursing compassionate donors.
But it was problematic if money offered over and above costs became a motivation for donating. This had to be weighed against the ethics of leaving patients untreated on a waiting list, but it was possible there were other ways of raising donor rates, he said.

A Kidney Foundation spokeswoman said the organisation supported the idea of reimbursing donors' costs. "We think it's a very good idea, but we would hate people to see it as buying an organ