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We shouldn't have to beg for life-saving medical care
SOME of my more loyal readers may recall a column I wrote almost a year ago about a woman on the waiting list for an NHS kidney transplant.
Fortunately, she had a grown-up daughter who had told her that, if things became desperate and the NHS could not find a kidney for her, she would give her one of her own.
But then, tragically, her daughter died in an accident and the NHS harvested her two kidneys and decided her mother should not have either of them. They gave them, instead, to two strangers.
Mr Adrian MacNeil, the state apparatchik in charge of organ transplants, justified this ghoulish "theft" by saying the NHS knew best who should be given the kidneys of our dead relatives and the grieving mother must just accept his decision.
Mine was not the only voice raised against this tin pot tyrant and he said he would conduct a review to discover whether there might be exceptional circumstances in which he would allow us to keep the organs of our own relatives, to save our lives, instead of treating them as simple, nationalised assets. That review has now been completed and, as a result, the Government has proposed an amendment to the Health Bill currently wending its way through Parliament.
What does the amendment say? Does it give us back the lifeless, but potentially life-giving bodies of our own relatives? No, it does not! It keeps them for the state, but it gives Mr MacNeil and his friends the discretion to let us keep them, even if we are not at the top of the NHS waiting list, if they decide we are particularly deserving.
In other words, the organs of our dead relatives will still belong to the state, but it will set up machinery by which, if we grovel hard enough and promise to live our lives in exactly the way the state requires of us, they may, possibly allocate our relatives' organs to us.
I'll bet this new procedure will give Mr Adrian MacNeil and his friends a lovely warm glow. Not only will they be able to allocate our relatives' organs, as before, to people at the top of their list, but there will now be the extra dimension of having desperate members of the families of the deceased grovelling for them.
The amendment is despicable, leaving desperate people begging, pleading and cajoling for their lives to be saved.
Like Caesar of old, Mr MacNeil and his friends will be able to put their thumbs up, so they can live, or down, so they can die.
The situation will be even worse than it is now. There is only one rule that makes any sense at all, to ordinary people. If a member of our family dies and we need an organ, it should belong to us.
If we do not need it, it should go to the NHS.
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Weather for Clitheroe
Sunday 05 February 2012
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