I have a hectic mind.  My mind never stops.  I could be sitting on the train, walking down the street or in a meeting at work and conversations will continually cycle through my mind.  The worst is usually at night when I’m trying to sleep.  I’ll play my day back in snippets or play my next day in hope.  Even when I don’t have anything concerning me or a big event in my life my thoughts will continue in a random manner.  I’ll wonder how many people in the room with me have webbed toes.  Or how I’d look with purple hair.  Could a moth eat a whole dress?

But lately my mind has been consumed with organs.  How many kidneys are there in the world?  Are we ever going to able to grow a kidney that’s not in a pig?  What will it feel like to have a strangers kidney inside me?  Will I die before I get one?

And this has led me to researching the topic of donating organs.   I have found my research quite interesting and it has made my already strong opinion on this topic grow even stronger.

I believe that everyone should donate their organs.  I have always been of this view.  Be a hero in death.  When you die, you don’t need your organs anymore.  Don’t be selfish and hang on to things that you don’t need, be a hero and save lives.  I always believed that it would be such a wonderful dying thought to know that even though you are going to be dead as a person that somewhere a part of you lives on in another human being.  That you gave them the greatest gift possible – life.  I have always been a strong advocate for organ transplants and now that I am one of many waiting in a queue to be saved by a transplant of course I am even more for it!

My research hasn’t changed my opinion on donating organs but it has highlighted the inaccuracy of my thoughts on how to increase our donor rate.

I knew in Australia our organ donor rate was very low, and it is continuing to drop.  We are ranked 20 in the world.  Countries such as Spain and France have as much as double our rate of organ donors.  This low rate in Australia equates to nearly 3 people per day missing out on organ transplants.  For me in the world of kidneys there is about 11,000 of us on dialysis in Australia right now.  We are all waiting for kidneys.  Only 9% of us will be lucky enough to get a kidney.  That means 91% of us will need a machine to keep us alive for the rest of our lives or we will die waiting.  I could be in that 91%.

Prior to my recent burst of knowledge I thought I had the answers to solve this growing problem.  I thought that there are two simple things we need to do to increase our donor rate.  One make it an opt out system. This means that everyone is automatically an organ donor unless we officially opt out through a formal process.  And two we need more campaigns, more education – awareness, awareness, awareness.

Well I was wrong.  These are not the answers to spring boarding our low donor rate.  In fact the Australian government poured $250 million into a campaign in 2014 to promote awareness of the importance of donating organs.  It was a mass media campaign and despite the messages reaching every Australian household our donor rate actually decreased that year.  And the opt out system apparently is also not the answer as families will always be able to veto the donation once the person is dead.  Families have the last say and currently 38% of families override the wish of the deceased to be an organ donor.  This is usually due to the emotion of the moment.

So my question upon reading all this was well what can we do?  With the increase of type 2 diabetes to a level that is being tagged an ‘epidemic’ just the number of kidneys needed in Australia alone will increase dramatically in the coming years.  We need to do something.

Apparently there are two things we can do.

Firstly we can all have conversations with our families saying how important it is to us to donate our organs.  We can explain how we understand that it might be stressful and emotional at the time of our deaths, but we are making it clear that under no circumstances are they to override our dying wish.

Secondly we need to improve our system.  We need to give our medical teams the training and support in identifying early potential organ donors and the skills to work with the families in discussing the organ donor process and getting their buy in before it’s too late.

Apparently these are the two things that will save lives.  There probably isn’t many of us that can influence the way we run our medical practices across Australia but we can definitely all be organ donors and have clear conversations with our families.

It’s been a surprising journey into the statistics and issues of organ donation that we are facing as a country.   It is one that has invigorated me and I think I may have found my path into how I can try and make a difference and do something good out of this situation.

So stay tuned, who knows where I’m heading with this new found knowledge and drive….