Organ Donation

Organ donation refers to the process donating an organ in order to help a person who requires a transplant. There is a private list of the names of all the people who wish to donate their organ/s after death in the NHS Organ Donor Register. The relatives of the donor cannot obstruct his donation, although it is better to inform them whenever he registers.
Mostly, donations come from the heart-beating donors. This refers to the condition when the donor dies in the intensive care unit (ICU), but unnatural heart beat and breathing are provided till the organs to be donated have been wholly recovered. This method has proved to be highly successful as the oxygenated blood maintains the organs until they have been removed.
Organs like the skin, bone and kidney can even be donated by the non-heart beating donors. This means that the heart has stopped functioning and the patient can’t be saved at any cost. When a person donates an organ to his family member, the donation is called a live organ donation. In most of the cases, the family member is blood related, usually a parent or sometimes even the spouse.
Before starting off with the operation, the doctors test and confirm if the tissues and blood group are well-matched and screen for contagious diseases. The quality of the match is directly related to the success of the operation.

Parts can be donated

Kidneys: numerous people tend to have diseases related to the kidney. A transplant of the kidney is the best treatment advised to treat a kidney failure. Most of the kidneys donated are from people who have expired in the ICU, although over 20 % of the transplants done are from live donations. Live donations are better than those from dead people, as the kidneys generally start functioning as soon as the operation is done. The operation is quite a major one, but involves no risk for the donor, who can lead a healthy life with just one kidney.
Heart: most of the transplants of the heart are performed on people who have gone through a critical heart failure, those who have an expectancy of about one to one and a half year/s and those who cannot be helped by a surgery or medication any longer.
Lungs: damage can be caused to the lungs by respiratory conditions (like emphysema and chronic bronchitis) or cystic fibrosis. In such cases, when medication or a surgical therapy does not seem to work on the patient, a transplantation of the lung is suggested by the specialists.
Small bowel and Pancreas: a severe infection or an accident can cause such serious damages to the small bowel that it cannot even absorb ample amount of food for the person to stay alive. In such cases, transplantation of the small bowel is opted. Pancreatic transplantation is done on people who have extremely severe diabetes and a renal failure. In these cases, a kidney is transplanted along with the pancreas.
Corneas: Grave injuries in the cornea cause scarring, not allowing light to pass through the retina, leading to partial or whole blindness. Transplantation of the cornea is mostly successful and is performed under general anaesthesia.
Some other parts that can be donated are:

• Heart valves
• Tissues
• Bones, and
• Skin

In most of the cases the recipient does not face any health or physical issues but has to take immune-suppressant drugs, so that his/her body does not reject the incoming organ. These drugs involve the risk of getting cancer. The donor of the organ faces mild issues like depression or continual wound pain.