Organ Donation

BBC ONE West and 5 reported on an NHS response to a decline in organ donations in the UK. BBC ONE West said the NHS was launching an urgent appeal for more people to come forward and its first urgent response plan, as almost 9,000 people were on the transplant waiting list, an all-time high, and donor numbers were 9% lower than at the same time the previous year. 5 reported that the NHS said urgent action was needed after a fall in donors. Both channels reported a fall in family consent. BBC ONE West said the consent rate had dropped from 67% to 57% over five years, a decline it also described as almost a fifth, while 5 put the rate at about 57%, down 10% over five years. 5 reported that hundreds of potential donations did not go ahead because relatives had to guess what the deceased would have wanted. BBC ONE West said families often did not know what a loved one would have wanted at the time of the donation discussion, and that the NHS wanted people to sign the register and tell their families. BBC ONE West also reported the case of Ollie, a boy born with a rare metabolic disorder who received a liver transplant after waiting eight months; his older brother, Kieran, had died with the same condition five years earlier. The donor was 17-year-old Miriam Lee, who collapsed suddenly and died with a heart attack one day after collecting her AS exam results. BBC ONE West said the two families later made contact and became close, and that nine people die every week in the UK while waiting for a donor.

This is a cross-channel consensus summary, not an objective account. Consensus can be uniformly wrong, or omit what only one channel covered.