Encourage living donors - consultant

Wednesday November 16th, 2011

Doctors can reasonably encourage healthy people to donate a kidney to a stranger, a senior consultant argues today.

Dr Antonia Cronin, a consultant nephrologist at the MRC Centre for Transplantation at King's College, London, says the use of living donors must be an integral part of NHS strategy.

Writing for the British Medical Journal, she says it has an "outstanding record".

And altruistic donations made by "strangers" now amount to three per cent of kidney transplants using living donors, she says.

Living donors have good long-term survival and express great satisfaction with their actions, she says.

She says: "If something is not only not wrong to do but actually a good thing to do, then it cannot be wrong to encourage the doing of it."

She adds: "Encouraging healthy competent adults to voluntarily donate one of their kidneys for the benefit of another by providing them with adequate information about the process involved and recognising the value of their donation is consistent with the ethos of the NHS, which exists for the common good."

Her point of view is challenged in the journal by Associate Professor Walter Glannon, a philosopher from the University of Calgary, Canada.

He writes: "It is one thing for a doctor to expose a patient to some risk in order to treat a disease; it is quite another to encourage a patient to put his or her own physical health at risk in order to benefit another.

"There is nothing ethically objectionable about a competent adult initiating this process. But it is ethically objectionable when a doctor initiates it."

British Medical Journal November 16 2011

Tags: Internal Medicine | NHS | UK News

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