New guidelines aim to provide guidance for the Canadian organizations and transplant programs facing that challenging question, though some experts are raising concerns about how to balance who a donor wants to get the organ with who might need it most.on June 26, outline the recommendations for how transplant organizations and programs should handle “directed donation”, in which a person still living can designate a recipient for one of their organs.
“They said, ‘Okay, you’re now allowing organ donation after assisted dying, we want to have MAiD at home and still be an organ donor. We want to be able to choose who our organs go to,'” Dr. Kim Wiebe told Global News in an interview.1:31Wiebe and the CMAJ have now laid out guidance for how to approach the question.
A list of “core principles” are laid out in the guidelines to help organizations craft their policies for donation, including the advice that directed donation requests be weighed on a case-by-case basis and for the organ recipient to be someone the MAiD donor has a “long-standing emotional relationship.
“You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “You cannot on the one hand, [have] somebody saying, ‘I want my auntie or my son or my daughter or whoever to get this, and this is the only way I would do it.’ And… say, ‘Yeah, absolutely, great,’ and then just grab it and give it to somebody else.” He said medical officials will need to “just bite the bullet” and say the organ would be given to somebody who may not be in the greatest need.