Directed deceased organ donation policy needs to be implemented in Canada in order to increase the rate of organ donation registration in its 36.29 million populations
Deceased Directed organ donation has been used for many years to save lives. Directed deceased organ donation is a request which entails directing an organ to a specific person. These requests usually occur when the donor or the donor’s family is either related to the receiver or both know one another personally. The Canadian Medical Association policy was developed in Canada so as to guide physicians and other health practitioners. This policy provides that deceased directed donations are recognized if only the concerned agencies ensure the verification of the medical match of the specified recipient’s organ. Just one organ is directed to a specified recipient. This policy operates under the principle of Dead Donor Rule stipulating that donors have to be dead before organ procurement and the organ should not cause the death. In my view, this policy is important as its focus on saving lives by ensuring organs are donated to the appropriate people suitable for the organ while taking into consideration those who are urgently in need of the organ transplant. Therefore, this paper will discuss whether Canadian Medical Association policy on deceased directed organ donation policies is good or bad.
Apparently, this policy is very good. This is because the policy ensures the well-being and full recovery of the recipient as it restricts and rejects any donation of deceased donor organ lest the organ is meant for distribution through an impartially and equitable donation. Moreover, the policy emphasizes that it is mandatory that specified recipient is identified and allocated the organ instead of a person in order to enhance effectiveness. The policy itself is a legal framework which acts as the backbone of facilitating organs transplant. This policy helps to save a lot of lives since they ensure that donation of organs from deceased donors based on equity, the principle of justice and especially emphasizing on those patients who need urgent medical attention (Liverman et al., 2017). The policy has proven to be consistent and help to avoid the needless untimely death of patients awaiting transplant as it makes them a priority while ensuring the organs donated match and are compatible with the receiver. Furthermore, the policy meets the goals of organ transplant as it ensures that those in urgent need of a transplant are first considered, equitable and consistent allocation of organs which has helped saved a lot of lives.
From a different perspective, the policy on direct deceased organ donation may be bad. I think the policy seems to be suppressing the autonomy since they have strict conditions. We cannot incorporate conditions as a gift to the society. Despite the willingness to donate organs to strangers as a gift, this policy imposes conditions that limit one’s capacity to receive the organ based on the suitability and match of the recipient’s body with the transplanted organ (Moorlock et al., 2016). Ethically, this policy is bad because they consider human organs as property. Human organs are not property, the government considering human organs as property and taking control of them is ethically wrong (Liverman et al., 2017). Moreover, these policies sometimes are oppressive as they exercise their dispositional powers to the donors denying them the ability to direct the donation at their own will.
My stand is that the Canadian Medical Association policy is good. The policy promotes an equitable allocation and impartial justice. Generally, this policy has significantly shaped the transplantation field and therefore this policy should be entirely implemented and fully applied to various types of transplant. Moreover, we need to have the ability to explain how and where certain predominant aspects of this policy and also property rights like these originate from. Considering human organs as property or resource needs to be taken into consideration what this could imply to both individual donor ownership and directed donation.