Professional Arrogance and Public Misunderstanding

Professional Arrogance and Public Misunderstanding Any assessment of the impact of required request legislation on organ and tissue procurement must begin by defining required request laws. Of the forty-one states that have passed such laws during the past three years, approximately half have enacted strong required request policies. These states have mandated that hospital administrators be responsible for insuring that next-of-kin or legal guardians are asked about their willingness to donate organs and tissues of the deceased when a death has been pronounced in a hospital setting. Most strong required request laws, such as those enacted by Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, allow a person other than a physician to be designated to make requests. These laws also call for documentation that a request was made and require health departments to facilitate implementation of the legislation by assisting hospitals in educating their staffs and by monitoring the impact of required request legislation on the overall availability of organs and tissues for transplantation. In only one state, Kentucky, is there explicit mention of a penalty for failure to comply with required request legislation. The federal government and roughly twenty states have enacted laws that differ in important respects from strong required request legislation. Federal law as well as the laws in states such as California and Tennessee mandate that hospitals create protocols through which next-of-kin or legal guardians will be notified about the possibility of donating organs or tissues. These "weak" required request laws leave the details of requests and monitoring to individual hospitals. Perhaps the most significant difference, however, is that the federal law, which became effective in November 1987, links the creation of a donor protocol to continued eligibility for receiving monies from the Medicare program. Because of these substantial variations, assessing the impact of required request legislation is complicated. Moreover, many state laws have been in effect for as little as a year or less. The federal law is simply too new to permit any reliable estimate of its impact on either hospital practices regarding organ and tissue procurement or on the overall availability of organs and tissues for transplantation. The fact that required request laws have not been enacted in a social policy vacuum makes this task all the more complex. Many states have enacted laws mandating that occupants of automobiles and other vehicles wear seatbelts. Others have raised the legal age for purchasing alcohol and/or stiffened penalties for drunk driving. Still others have lowered the legal maximum speed for vehicular traffic. Since automobile and motorcycle accidents account for a large proportion of those persons whose kidneys, hearts, and other vital organs could be used for transplantation, changes in these laws have a direct impact on the number of persons who die each year who might serve as organ or tissue donors. For example, traffic accident fatalities in Minnesota have declined 10 percent in 1987 from the numbers recorded in 1986. Seat belt laws in Great Britain are believed to have brough about a 15 percent decrease in fatalities from accidents. Yet no reliable data exist on the actual number of persons who could have donated an organ or a kidney. For all these reasons, it is hard to know exactly how to respond to anecdotal reports concerning the impact of required request on the overall supply of organs and tissues. My associates and I at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota are currently conducting a telephone survey of ten states in which required request laws of one kind or another have been in effect for more than six months. We have contacted organ procurement agencies, health department officials, and representatives of regional eyebanks to obtain whatever information they can offer concerning the impact of the new laws. …