Seamus Burns explores the legality of paired transplants
The announcement last October that two couples—Peter and Roma Horrell and an anonymous couple from Lothian—had participated in the first paired organ transplantation in the UK, heralds a welcome possible method for desperately ill patients receiving an organ in a transplantation system where demand for organs greatly exceeds the supply. Even though some 14.5 million people are registered with the NHS Organ Donor Register, UK Transplant, the organ matching and allocation organisation, estimates that more than 7,000 patients were listed as actively waiting for a transplant at the end of March 2007.
LEGALITY OF PAIRED TRANSPLANTS
The innovative practice of paired transplants is governed by the provisions of the Human Tissue Act 2004 (Persons who Lack Capacity to Consent and Transplants) Regulations 2006 (SI 2006/1659) (the regulations) which came into effect in September 2006. A paired donation is defined in the regulations and means an arrangement under which:
“(a) transplantable material is removed from a donor (D) for transplant to a person who is not genetically related or known to D, and
(b) transplantable
