Organ Donation Essay

The decision to determine who gets an organ is something that cannot be taken lightly. If proper protocol is not followed, issues such as biasness and judging people based on factors like socioeconomic status may be used to determine this dilemma. For this reason, organ transplantation is overseen by government regulators. The Division of Transplantation (DoT), which falls under the US Department of Health and Human Services, oversees this process. Organs are allocated according to strict rules that take into account physical matching, tissue and blood type matching, medical criteria, waiting time, severity of illness. The allocation system is blind to name, race, sex and wealth. The allocation rules have been developed over many years of deliberation by physicians and other transplant professionals, transplant candidates and recipients, donor families, and representatives of the federal government. (CITE ThIs) Removing these variables and following protocol causes the medical professional to make a decision on fairness rather than feelings, biasness, and possibly corruption such as bribery.

In this paper I will be using the normative theory of utilitarianism as the best defensible approach to increase organ donations. Utilitarianism is a theory that seeks to increase the greatest good for the greatest amount of people (Pense2007, 61). The utilitarian theory is the best approach because it maximizes adult organ donations (which are the greater good) so that the number of lives saved would increase along with the quality of life, and also saves money and time.

44). While respecting patients’ opinions should be a high priority, healthcare professionals such as nurses should still place value in educating patients on the need for organ donors.

Due to the increase in medical technology over the years, medical advancements, such as organ transplants, have grown in commonality. This has increased the number of patient who needs such care. The problem with organ transplants arises from the debate on the ethical way to distribute organs and how to combat the issue of a lack of organ donors. An ethical approach to solving these issues is to develop a system of equal access that relies on maximizing benefits as well as respecting the rights of personal property through better patient-physician conversations when trying to increase organ donors.

England currently practices an opt-in system of organ donation. The waiting list for organ donor transplants exceeds 10,000 meaning that people are losing their lives everyday due to a shortage of donor organs. It has been suggested for a while that England adopts the opt-out system, in order to increase donation rates and decrease the number of people dying whilst waiting for an organ transplant. This systematic review aims to present the different ethical arguments supporting a change of organ donation system to opting-out instead of opting-in.

Organ donation has the power to change a life ending incident into a life giving one. Throughout the United States many patients are suffering due to the lack of a vital organ, because there is more demand than supply of organs, many patients die without ever receiving one. Although organ donation saves many lives, there have been questions in regards to ethics that surround it. People are even making the argument that it should not be practiced. Another question that has surfaced is, how can organ donation be improved in the United States so that people in need of organs can receive them at a high rate? Even though organ donation in the United States has received criticism due to ethical dilemmas such as priority distribution, contributing to illegal harvesting and alternative sources; the possibilities of saving lives and giving people a second chance outweighs the potential consequences it holds. Organ donation is one of the most important modern day medical marble that needs to be better utilized United States.

Presumed consent is also referred to as the “opt-out” system because individuals would have the option of opting out of the system and not donating their organs. On a moral level, the debate between presumed refusal and presumed consent seeks to achieve the fundamental goal of organ donation. The goal is to show that their respective systems of organ obtainment are morally and economically superior to the other methods.

The allocation of scarce resources is an ongoing issue in healthcare today. The scarcity of many specific interventions include beds in the intensive care unit, donor organs, and vaccines during a pandemic influenza are widely acknowledged as an extensive issue in healthcare ethics. The allocation of scarce resources is the determination of how to equally and fairly use scarce medical resources available in a healthcare environment. This paper will focus on donor organs for transplantation and the ethical dilemmas associated with donation/transplantation. Organ shortage is the greatest challenge facing the field of organ transplantation in today’s world (Saidi, R., & Kenan, S., 2014). Ethical principles and regulation requirements often overlap.

Available became controversial. While the question of the dialysis machine is still controversial, the health system was caught in another ethical dilemma regarding organ transplantation. Organ transplantation is closely linked to the issue of cleanliness because patients with kidney failure can get an organ transplant as an alternative to hemodialysis. The issue is complicated by the fact Medicare is financed by organ transplant, and there are those who believe that the distribution of rare transplant is not right. There are thousands of terminal patients whose lives can be saved by organ transplantation, but there are no formulas of work that can be used to determine which of the thousands of patients will be given priority. It is left to the discretion of medical officers to decide who is worth saving. The ability to keep someone alive by replacing one or more of their major organs is a splendid achievement of medicine of the 20th century.

Organ transplantation is a term that most people are familiar with. When a person develops the need for a new organ either due to an accident or disease, they receive a transplant, right? No, that 's not always right. When a person needs a new organ, they usually face a long term struggle that they may never see the end of, at least while they are alive. The demand for transplant organs is a challenging problem that many people are working to solve. Countries all over the world face the organ shortage epidemic, and they all have different laws regarding what can be done to solve it. However, no country has been able to create a successful plan without causing moral and ethical dilemmas.

Distrust will cause policies of procurement to be ineffective, especially if the public believes that these policies for organ allocation is unfair. Ethical dilemma is created with transplant allocation, for similar to health insurance and healthcare, the access to treatment is not available to all equally. All four ethical principles must be respected in order for a medical practices to be considered ethical.

The most controversial issue with receiving organ donations is that the donor cannot legally choose who the recipient will be in most cases. Of course in a situation where one’s parent is dying, one is allowed to give up an organ if it is a good match, but if one decides to donate a kidney to his or her best

Innovative advances in the practice of medicine have increased the life span of the average American. This along with the growing population in the United States and has created a shortfall in the number of organs available for transplant today. The current system of allocation used to obtain organs for transplant faces difficulty because of two primary reasons according to Moon (2002). The two perceptions that stop potential organs donors are that the allocation criteria is unfair and favors certain members of society and/or that organs may be allocated to someone who has destroyed their organs by misuse (Moon, 2002). Many individuals decline to donate organs because anyone requiring an organ transplant is placed on a waiting list and it is possible that individuals who have destroyed their organs by their own actions or convicted criminals could receive donated organs before someone whose organs are failing through no fault of their own and positively contribute to society. When a celebrity or wealthy individual requires a transplant they are often viewed as "jumping" the waitlist but

In a world where life expectancy has increased tremendously over the last century because of new technology and medical procedures, we find humanity ever pushing the boundaries on what it can do to prevent loss of life where possible. One example is the area of organ donation and transplantation. However, unlike many other technologies or procedures which can be built, manufactured, or learned, organ transplantation requires one thing that we can’t create yet: an organ itself. Because our increased life span causes more people to require a replacement organ when theirs starts to fail, the demand has far outrun the supply and the future only looks to get worse. “Between the years 1988 and 2006 the number of transplants doubled, but the

In February 2003, 17-year-old Jesica Santillan received a heart-lung transplant at Duke University Hospital that went badly awry because, by mistake, doctors used donor organs from a patient with a different blood type. The botched operation and subsequent unsuccessful retransplant opened a discussion in the media, in internet chat rooms, and in ethicists' circles regarding how we, in the United States, allocate the scarce commodity of organs for transplant. How do we go about allocating a future for people who will die without a transplant? How do we go about denying it? When so many are waiting for their shot at a life worth living, is it fair to grant multiple organs or multiple