Sorry I can’t give an exact source as I just recycled a huge (several months’)backlog of newspapers and Sunday supplements—but a supplement (Parade??) had an article about “thinking outside the box” to solve problems. The first example they used was this issue of the low number of organ donors. The solution, which the article said was currently in practice in Spain, was to assume EVERYONE was a donor unless they clearly opted out. So be careful when traveling in Spain!![I can’t remember if the ‘opt out’ process was described in the article.]
Second recent article, again can’t remember source, dealt with issue of increasing the number of donors using “cardiac death” as the criteria instead of “brain dead”. My memory of the article described an extremely short period between declaration of cardiac death and the removal of organs—in some cases only 5 minutes or so. No, these were NOT deaths by traumatic head injuries but deaths via “heart stops beating.” Although the article was in favor of using cardiac, not brain death, as the criteria, the author did quote the concern of some medical folks of feeling like vultures. [This last is not a direct quote but my interpretation of their comments.]
This is accomplished by bringing the living patient to the OR, removing him from the ventilator and waiting for cardiac death to occur and immediately proceeding to harvest the organs. This happens now, frequently. However, almost all of these patients are head injured or stroke patients. Patients who have suffered a massive heart attack, for example, will have gone a long time with inadequate blood flow to the organs for them to be harvested in this manner.