Collaborative requesting does not increase consent for organ donation.

Collaborative requesting--a request for organ donation made jointly by the patient's clinician and a donor transplant coordinator--does not increase consent rates compared with routine requesting by the patient's clinician alone, according to new research published earlier this month in the British Medical Journal. The technique is advocated by the United Kingdom's Organ Donation Task Force, but its effectiveness had never been rigorously tested.

One of the biggest barriers to increased donor rates is the refusal of consent by relatives, Medical News Today reported. A recent audit of 341 deaths in intensive care units in the UK revealed that 41 percent of relatives of potential donors denied consent. In an interview study, a third of relatives who had refused donation said that they would not refuse again, whereas only a few of people who had given consent regretted their decision.

There may therefore be factors in the way the request for donation is made that could affect the decision. For the study, Dr. Duncan Young from John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and colleagues carried out the first randomized controlled trial to compare collaborative requesting with routine testing. The study found that 61% of relatives in the routine requesting group consented to organ donation, compared to 57% consenting in the collaborative requesting group.