The urgency of the resuscitation and the impaired ability of the patient to make a reasonable autonomous decision both conspire against adequate consideration of the principles of medical ethics. Informed consent is usually not possible for these reasons and this leads many to consider that consent is not required for resuscitation, because resuscitation brings benefit and prevents harm and bec...

In the wake of scandals about the unauthorised retention of organs following postmortem examination, the issue of valid consent (or the lack of it) has returned to the forefront. Emphasis is put on obtaining explicit authorisation from the patient or family prior to any medical intervention, including those involving the dead. Although the controversies in the UK arose from the retention of hum...

BACKGROUND The organ donor shortfall in the UK has prompted calls to introduce legislation to allow for presumed consent: if there is no explicit objection to donation of an organ, consent should be presumed. The current debate has not taken in account accepted meanings of presumption in law and science and the consequences for rights of ownership that would arise should presumed consent become...

I argue that a policy of presumed consent for cadaveric organ procurement, which assumes that people do want to donate their organs for transplantation after their death, would be a moral improvement over the current American system, which assumes that people do not want to donate their organs. I address what I take to be the most important objection to presumed consent. The objection is that i...

New legislation in Greece towards presumed consent for organ donation, effective as of June 2013, has come at a critical moment. This pilot study aims to explore awareness, specific concerns and intentions about the new organ donation framework among patients attending Greek general practices in a rural and urban setting. Only 2.6% of respondents had a donor card, a mere 9.6% was aware of new l...

In the U.S., Great Britain and in many other countries, the gap between the demand and the supply of human organs for transplantation is on the rise, despite the efforts of governments and health agencies to promote donor registration. In some countries of continental Europe, however, cadaveric organ procurement is based on the principle of presumed consent. Under presumed consent legislation, ...

BACKGROUND Maintaining adequately high organ donation rates proves essential to offering patients all appropriate and available treatment options. However, the act of donation is in itself an individual decision that requires a depth of understanding that interacts with the social setting and the institutional framework into which an individual is embedded. This study contributes to understandi...

OBJECTIVES To estimate how many people object to storage of biological samples collected in health care in Sweden and to their use in research and how many withdraw previous consent. DESIGN Cross sectional study of register data. SETTING Biobanks used in Swedish health care, 2005-6. Population Data on refusal to consent were obtained for 1.4 million biobank samples per year from 20 of 21 co...

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in presumed consent systems for organ donation. The U.K.'s Organ Donation (Presumed Consent and Safeguards) Bill of 2004 proposed a sweeping change in the law in the form of an opt-out system for the donation of cadaver organs. The Organ Donation Task-force in 2008 later examined the idea of presumed consent at length, before concluding that our...

The UK has an opt-in system of consent for postmortem organ donation. More specifically, the Human Tissue Act 2004 prohibits the removal, storage, and use of organs postmortem for a range of ‘‘scheduled purposes’’—which include transplantation—unless ‘‘appropriate consent’’ has been given. Appropriate consent can be given by the donor premortem by signing and carrying a donor card, or by opting...