No One Dies Waiting for an organ transplant
A free global session with doctors, faith voices, donor families and people living with a transplant. Ahead of World Organ Donation Day on 13 August.
The gap between yes and said out loud.
Ask people directly and most say they would donate. Far fewer have joined a register. Fewer still have told the person who will actually be asked.
A person makes one decision. That decision gives another person life.One donor can transform many lives
Four hours. One question.
Under the opt-out law now running across all four UK nations, adults are treated as willing donors unless they record otherwise. That change was hard won and it matters. It did not remove the family from the room.
Specialist nurses still sit down with relatives and ask what their person would have wanted. When the family knows, the answer comes quickly. When they are guessing, on the worst night of their lives, they often say no. That is where most of the shortfall actually sits.
So this afternoon has a small and achievable aim. Nobody here will try to talk you into anything. The job is to move a private, vague, generally positive feeling into one spoken sentence at a kitchen table, where it can do some good.
Every view is welcome here, hesitation included. Nobody watching will be told what to decide.
One decision. Eight people.
Heart, lungs, liver, two kidneys, pancreas, small bowel. One person who has said yes can reach eight others waiting, and tissue donation reaches many more again.
Eight is the figure carried on this year's campaign artwork. NHS Blood and Transplant's own wording is that a single donor can save up to nine lives. Either way, the point holds.
What we will actually talk about.
What really happens
The transplant process explained in plain language by the clinicians who do it, including the parts people are most afraid to ask about.
Donor families
The decision itself, and what living with it looks like years later. In their own words, at their own pace.
On the other side
People who are alive because a stranger's family said yes. What a second chance actually feels like once the novelty wears off.
Faith and belief
What the major traditions actually teach, drawn from faith voices rather than assumption. Reservations included, not skirted around.
Living donation
Giving a kidney, or part of a liver, while you are alive and well. Over forty per cent of UK donations now come from living donors.
The law, honestly
Opt-out across the UK, priority registration in Israel, and why India performs record numbers of transplants with very few deceased donors.
An ordinary Tuesday
What a transplant gives back is not drama. It is the school run, a walk without stopping, a birthday nobody expected you to see. That is what is actually waiting at the end of the conversation.
Three things. The third is the one that counts.
Tap each step as you do it
Who you will hear from.
Clinicians
Transplant and specialist nursing teams who do this work every week.
Donor families
People who were asked, and who said yes.
Recipients
Living proof that the conversation is worth having.
Faith voices
Speaking to the questions their own communities actually ask.
Community advocates
The people doing this work where it counts, in halls and mandirs and mosques.
The full line-up and timings are being confirmed and will be published here first.
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Join Us Live Sunday, from 2pm BST
Free, open to everyone, no registration. Bring the person you have been meaning to have this conversation with.
