At the beginning of this year, Ante was unsure whether he would live to become a dad. He waited, anxiously, as his health deteriorated and the birth date of his first child drew closer. Ante and wife Kaya were on an emotional rollercoaster.
Ante’s life was saved through the gift of a liver transplant. He lived to become a dad.
Our donors and their families give a remarkable gift to others. The gift of life, hope and a future.
How do you say ‘thank you’ for saving a life?
This act of generosity is of the utmost importance.
This is why the Australian Government has announced this Sunday as DonateLife Thank You Day. A day for each of us, as a community and as individuals, to say, ‘thank you’ to organ and tissue donors and their families who agreed to donation.
More than 7,000 Australian lives have been saved by more than 2,000 deceased organ donors and their families since 2009, when Australia’s national reform program began.
Thousands more lives have been saved and transformed through the generosity of tissue donors, and of living kidney or partial liver donors.
As illustrated by Ante’s story, for each life saved or improved through a transplant, the lives of many more are transformed. These include family members, friends, work colleagues and communities.
This Sunday, we are asking all Australians to take part in DonateLife Thank You Day as a day for us all to say ‘thank you’ to living donors, deceased donors and their families.
As an intensive care specialist, my role is to do everything possible to save lives.
Part of my role includes caring for those patients and their families who are in a position to save lives through donation. For these families, donation often provides comfort amid the devastating loss of their loved one. They know that in agreeing to donation, they are fulfilling the wishes of their loved ones and at the same time sparing another family from losing someone they love.
Families play a crucial role in the donation process. They are asked to confirm the donation decision of their loved one before donation can proceed, and they provide vital health information about their loved one.
As one who, in my role as an intensive care specialist, talks with grieving families about the possibility of donation, I know the profound difference a prior conversation about a loved one’s donation decision can make. In fact, where the deceased had registered their donation decision, families agree to donation in 90 per cent of cases. Where families had prior discussion, they agree in 77 per cent of cases. Where the deceased had neither registered nor shared their decision, the consent rate drops to 48 per cent.
A main reason families decline donation is because they simply don’t know what their loved one would have wanted. With one organ and tissue donation able to transform the lives of ten or more people, every one of these prior conversations has the potential to benefit many people in our community.
Saving lives through organ and tissue donation is one of the greatest acts of altruism we can perform.
Today, I thank those in our community who have made that choice.
For the 1,600 Australians on official transplant waiting lists at any one time, that single, selfless act on the part of a stranger can mean the difference between life and death, being healthy and sick, between sight and blindness, or between mobility and never walking again.
For many, an organ or tissue transplant offers the only chance to live to see their children grow up, to resume employment, to travel and see family and friends, to grow old with their partner.
Organ and tissue donation is a powerful gift. If we want to have hope that our own life or that of a loved one could be saved if needed, we all need to support organ and tissue donation and ourselves agree to be donors.
Despite widespread public support for donation, many don’t realise that the opportunity to donate organs is actually quite rare. Only around 700 people each year – less than 1 per cent of those who die in hospital – die in the specific circumstances that allow for organ donation. Tissue donation is possible in a wider range of circumstances as the deceased does not need to have died in hospital and tissue can be donated up to 24 hours after death.
We need to maximise every opportunity for donation in order to save and improve as many lives as we can.
One of the ways we can do this is by registering our own donation decision on the Australian Organ Donor Register. We need to ensure our loved ones know our decision – and we need to know their decisions.
On DonateLife Thank You Day, we thank those individuals and families who have made organ and tissue donation possible.
And to those Australians who have registered their decision to become organ and tissue donors, and who have discussed their decisions with their loved ones, we say ‘Thank You’ in advance.
