He can change tune on organs
IT’S easy to be cynical about politicians these days. And a lot of the time they give us plenty to be cynical about. But today, the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has the chance to do what we can only hope he went into politics for – to make lives better. And, in this case, to save lives. Hundreds of them. Mr Hunt has agreed to meet Geoffrey Robinson MP, who is backing the Mirror’s campaign to change the law on organ donation and bringing a Private Members’ Bill on it next year. But if the Health Secretary was to say he is happy to throw the whole issue open to public consultation, to ask us, the people, whether we think changing the law is a good idea, it could save a whole lot of time. And when you’re waiting on an organ transplant list, time is something you are pretty short of. If the law was changed it would mean that everyone is presumed to have agreed to donate their organs after death unless they’ve said otherwise. At the moment it’s assumed that you haven’t agreed, which is why families have to make heartbreaking decisions about whether they want to donate a loved one’s organs at what is probably the worst moment they’ve known.
The Mirror has been banging on about this issue for a couple of years now. Because we believe we wouldn’t be doing our jobs properly if we weren’t highlighting the hundreds of lives that could be saved – lives just like those of your kids and my kids – by a simple change in the law.
This week I met lifelong Mirror reader Patricia Carroll, whose daughter Natalie died on New Year’s Day 2014, aged 38, while waiting for a new pancreas and kidney after her organs were damaged by type-1 diabetes.
Yet after she passed away Natalie was able to save the life of an eight-month-old baby girl by donating her heart valves. And last year Patricia became a kidney donor herself.
So Pat knows a thing or two about the importance of receiving and donating organs.
And having seen it from both sides, her message is starkly simple: “Why wouldn’t we want a law which keeps people alive? Anyone who’s been through the agony of losing a child or anyone they love knows there is only one thing that matters – and that is life.”
Let’s hope Jeremy Hunt thinks that way too.
Lives could be saved by a simple change in the law