Human Tissue Bill

The debate on this part includes schedules 3, 5, and 6.

It has been quite a while since we discussed the Human Tissue Bill; I believe it was in November last year. To recap, the bill will replace the Human Tissue Act 1964. It is quite an old Act, and it is time it was updated. At the same time that the Health Committee looked at the Human Tissue Bill, it looked at my member’s bill, the Human Tissue (Organ Donation) Amendment Bill. Unfortunately that bill did not get the support of the committee, and in Part 3 of the Human Tissue Bill there is a provision for an organ donor register for a future Government to bring in if it feels one is necessary.

To me that is not satisfactory. I believe there is a need for an organ donor register. At the moment we have Organ Donation New Zealand, which looks after the retrieval of organs throughout New Zealand. We have had terribly low organ donor rates in New Zealand, and although they seem to be picking up we are still way back from where we were a few years ago. It seems to me we are not making much progress, and without a register where people can indicate their wishes for where their organs are to go after death, there is no framework for an informed consent process. That is basically what this bill is all about; it gives a consent framework in which the individual’s wishes, if they meet the definition of informed consent, are given primacy. I think we are no better off. We will only be treading water and waiting for time and waiting for organ donor rates that might improve a little. But really we are going backwards. We have a diabetes epidemic, we have a tidal wave of renal failure coming our way, we have hepatitis issues, and we have end-stage liver failure problems, and so forth.

I will digress a little. In the news today there has been the story of an 18-year-old woman with a young baby who wishes to donate part of her liver to her young child, a baby who has a liver disorder. By the time the child is 3 years of age she will need an organ donor. Although this is a live organ donation, this bill is about deceased donor organs. I make the point that it is never too late to review the situation. In the Auckland transplant unit the ethics committee was very careful 7 years ago when the unit first started to do this organ donation procedure, and the ethics committee decided that 21 should be the age for consent. This liver donation procedure is now pretty much standard 7 years on, and I think it is time to review that age of consent. I hope the doctors will go back to the ethics committee and ask for some discretion on moving downwards to age 18. I hope that will happen quite quickly so that this young woman can donate part of her liver in order to save her baby’s life. I think that is all about the primacy of an individual’s wishes, and about moving forward. I make that point just to show that it is never too late to go back and review something.

In the UK, Gordon Brown has come out and said “Look, they need presumed consent.” That is a step further than the voluntary, opt-on register that I proposed in my member’s bill. So the UK is not reinventing the wheel; it is actually going further than what I proposed. I do not believe New Zealand is ready for a presumed consent register, but I think we desperately need an organ donor register so we can have an informed consent process. I keep coming back to that. This whole bill is about providing a consent framework where an individual’s wishes, if they meet the definition of informed consent, are given primacy. Basically, without an organ donor register there is no way an individual can give informed consent or dictate to people what that person wishes to do with his or her organs, unless he or she has some sort of living will or hopes that the relatives will do the right thing by him or her after death. Some people do not have a family. It is a very private decision, and those people may want to keep it to themselves. I keep coming back to the fact that without an organ donor register, people have no way of registering their consent.

That is probably all I have to say, and to sum it up, I am very unhappy about the situation.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 155 in the name of the Hon Pete Hodgson to Part 3 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

Part 3 as amended agreed to.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Marian Hobbs): The amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 156 in the name of the Hon Tariana Turia are out of order.

Schedule 1A agreed to.

Schedule 1B agreed to.

Schedule 1C agreed to.

Schedule 3 agreed to.

Schedule 5 agreed to.

Schedule 6 agreed to.

Clauses 1 and 2