Concerns Over New Organ Donor Guidelines Overblown

ABC News | Courtney Hutchison

A recent Washington Post article on the guidelines governing organ donation may have stirred unnecessary alarm, according to medical experts.

The article, published Monday in the Post, says new guidelines from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) will do away with a suggested two-minute wait time after the donor’s heart has stopped beating to assure death before donation begins. UNOS has always left the determination of these wait times up to the judgment of individual hospitals, however, and these guidelines won’t change that fact, according to UNOS spokesman Joel Newman.

“UNOS offers guidance on the different elements that hospitals should cover in their own organ donation policies, but the one thing we shouldn’t be weighing in on is how a hospital should be determining when death occurs,” says Charles Alexander, the immediate past president of UNOS and current president and CEO of the Living Legacy Foundation.

“We are there to facilitate donation only after the medical care team has independently determined that death is inevitable,” he says, adding that the article’s wording could produce confusion that in the worst case scenario may discourage patients from wanting to become donors.

“This article is a hysterical and inappropriate reaction to a very minor change in some standards. There is zero threat to the public well-being in this document,” says Dr. Jeffrey Punch, chief of the section of transplantation at the University of Michigan’s Department of Surgery.