Organ Transplant: Who gets them and who doesn’t?

Organ Transplant
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Organ Transplant
Organ transplantation is a life-saving medical intervention that has been linked to several positive outcomes. According to Vanholder et al. (2021), organ transplantation not only increases the survival rates of patients with organ failure but also enhances their quality of life. Given these benefits, many countries have put in place different mechanisms to guide the allocation of organ transplants. However, the demand for organ transplants is high, and the number of successfully performed transplants is low, which causes a lot of patients to stay on the waiting list for too long. For instance, in the United States (US), there is a significant gap between the demand for organ transplants and successful organ transplants. The number of viable organs outweighs the number of organ recipients on the waiting list (National Academies 2017). Determining who gets organ transplants and who does not can be a complicated endeavor, and as such, it is important to examine the ethical issues associated with the allocation of organ transplants. This paper explores the ethical challenges in organ transplants with a special focus on the guidelines and factors influencing the allocation of organ transplants to patients on the waiting list.
Ethical Challenges of Organ Transplant
Organ transplantation poses several ethical challenges for physicians and patients because it requires one person, deceased or alive, to voluntarily donate their organs to save another person’s life. Below are some of the ethical challenges associated with organ transplantation and allocation.
Equity, Justice, and Fairness
Given the high demand for organs and the shortage of viable organs, healthcare professionals have to determine who gets an organ transplant and who does not. While allocating organ transplants to patients, the transplant community has to create a balance between equity and utility while allocating scarce donor organs (Nadim et al., 2017). The community has to also maintain the effectiveness of the donor organs in saving lives. Organ transplantation raises the ethical concern of justice and fairness. According to Howard and Cornell (2016), transplant centers face the ethical issue of fairly allocating the few organs to a large number of patients on transplant waiting lists who could die due to a lack of a donor organ. Also, the ethical issue of how to place patients on the waiting list so that organs are allocated appropriately to save more lives arises.
To address the ethical challenge of allocation and placement and enhance justice and fairness, the transplant community has been provided with global, national, and local guidelines. At the global level, the World Health Organization (WHO) has developed some general guidelines that can be used to facilitate equality, justice, and fairness. One of the WHO’s guidelines is the distributive justice and equity guideline, which indicates that donor organs should be allocated to patients based on medical need, and other considerations, such as financial considerations, should be ignored (Navin et al., 2018). This guideline ensures that allocation is not based on socio-economic background or other ...