Between blood tests and heart rate monitoring, it’s a question Dr. Martha Taylor makes sure to ask her patients during their checkup: Are you registered as an organ donor?
The Kitchener, Ont., family physician knows first-hand how the simple sign-up can affect lives. Her 41-year-old brother-in-law was dying from a rare lung disease. What saved his life were the lungs of a 79-year-old donor.
“That really encouraged me to incorporate that question in my daily practice,” Taylor told Global News.
As for Taylor, she’s been a registered donor since she was 17 years old when she first got her driver’s license.
She’s one of the many Ontario doctors who are leading by example.
A new Canadian study suggests that doctors are far ahead of the general public when it comes to registering as organ donors. While only about 24 per cent of the Ontario public is registered, 43 per cent of the province’s doctors are registered organ donors.
The team leading the research hopes its findings are reassuring to the public who may have concerns about being an organ and tissue donor.
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“This is demonstrating to the public that physicians are much more likely to register. It also raises awareness that physicians have a further opportunity to lead from the front, and increase their registration rates,” lead author Dr. Amit Garg told Global News.
Garg is a kidney specialist at the London Health Sciences Centre and an Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences researcher. In his latest ICES research — in collaboration with the Trillium Gift of Life Network — Garg sought to compare organ donor registration rates between doctors and everyday Canadians.
There are a number of myths and misconceptions around consenting to organ and tissue donation. A primary myth is that doctors won’t work as hard to save the lives of registered organ donors when they’re in dire condition. But this misunderstanding is far from the truth, Garg said.
Doctors’ primary concern is to save lives — donation is only considered when all treatment options have been considered, Garg said.
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As far as he knows, this research is the first in the world to describe organ donation registry rates among physicians. He’s hoping the findings reverberate around the world to increase organ donation support.
The research was compiled using large health databases — the research team filtered out the doctors — about 15,000 of them. They also compared the physician group to people within the same demographic background (age, sex, income).
Turns out, 43 per cent of doctors were registered, followed by 29.5 per cent of Ontarians with a similar background. Twenty-four per cent of the general public was registered, based on 2013 data.
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Ontario migrated to a new organ donor registry format in recent years — via beadonor.ca — but not all provinces have made the change. B.C., Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and the Yukon have similar registries.
The decision to register is confidential so health care workers who care for those who are sick don’t know if you’re a donor. It’s only at the end of life that a separate organ donation team reviews the information in a registry and presents this information to the family of the deceased.
Right now, about 2.9 million Ontarians are registered and donors can withdraw or change their donor status at any time.
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One organ donor can save up to eight lives and assist another 75 others through tissue donation, according to TGLN.
In his line of work helping those with organ failure, Garg’s seen how donation provides a second chance at life for patients.
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The team’s full findings were published Wednesday afternoon in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
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