Clause 2 - ''Appropriate consent'': children
Human Tissue Bill
10:30 am
Dr Andrew Murrison (Westbury, Conservative)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman; that is extremely useful. We are told that the number of people registered by UK Transplant runs into the hundreds of thousands, which is extraordinary. It is difficult to tally that with the figures that the hon. Gentleman cites. Clearly, further work needs to be done. I maintain my impression that there is scope to improve the harvest of useable organs. I do not know, but strongly suspect, that moves in that direction would be more practicable and productive than overriding the wishes of next of kin in cases where people have already registered their wishes on a donor card or on the registry.
As the hon. Gentleman said, his amendments and those in my name and those of my hon. Friends the hon. Members for South Cambridgeshire and for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) are very similar. We chose to cite the Human Tissue Authority and to give our amendments a broader remit than his because it is important to reflect future developments and the possibility that they might improve the current means of giving consent to the removal of organs.
That touches on the issue of presumed consent, the idea behind which is to increase the harvest of organs. We all want to do that; the question is how best to achieve it. The means of gaining consent for the harvesting of organs may improve in future. We can think, for example, of the electronic patient record, entitlement cards—a possibility that my party is examining—or even a national identity card, which is controversial, but by no means impossible.
Such vehicles would make it far easier to register informed consent to the removal of organs after death, and would not rely on the notion of presumed consent, which is highly controversial. The hon. Gentleman may want to discuss this issue later in our proceedings, but organisations such as the BMA seem to be very keen on such vehicles as a means of increasing the harvest of organs. As I said, we are all in favour of that, but the question is how best to achieve it.