Well I am an RN for the past 22 years and I’m telling you the “pushiness” for a quick organ donation does occur! Some of the younger RN’s have been especially indoctrinated into the quicky “your young (brain bleed accident you pick the insult) victim has no hope” syndrome and are on the phone to Lifenet(Central Va’s organ donor quasi NGO) to get the whole ball going only to discover that the patient starts responding and the donation ends up not happening!
Yes there are protocols in place but mostly for detirmination of brain death or non survivable catastrophic
injury so that cardio vascular support of the “living cadaver” can be maintained until the vivisectors arrive.
I am not against the notion of donation, I am against a system of thought and practices that “hurries” the families along with-out the full detirmination of the patient’s present status and prospects for rehab!
I have seen patients who have had major insults in their brains stroll back through our units thanking those who had given them care. Some will always have some lingering memory or physical deficits, but 99% have gone on to resume useful lives.
These times scare me!
http://www.optn.org/latestData/rptData.asp
You should be ashamed of yourself. As an RN you should be far more conscientious with your facts. According to the organ procurement network, since 1988 there have been 412,747 organ transplants. Of those, 71,799 have gone to African Americans. This represents 17% of organs, not 50%. Additionally, the demand for kidneys is much higher in the African American community, so a percentage of these are kidney donations from live donors. I don’t see what the race of the recipient matters anyway.
As for the rush to contact Lifenet, maybe you see that. However, RNs certainly don’t make a determination of eligibility, and making a call to Lifenet is not the same as a premature harvesting of organs. Families can be pushed into authorization for organ donation, but that does not affect the process either.
The process works the same, and a patient must meet numerous criteria, one of which is brain death, to become an organ donor, whether the family or the RN wants it or not. Only 1% of patients are even considered eligible to donate organs, and 99% of them are identified in ICU, not ER. If you have actually seen a patient, that you believe did not meet the criteria for brain death, that was used for organ donation, did you report the crime? Have you even seen this? If you haven’t then why are indicating to others that this is likely to occur?