Critical pathway for deceased tissue donation: a novel adaptative European systematic approach.

A 'Critical pathway for deceased tissue donation' was developed by the European Committee on Organ Transplantation of the Council of Europe (CD-P-TO) with the aim of providing a common systematic approach to the deceased tissue donation process. Definitions of tissue donors according to the donation stage have been developed so that they can be adapted to different local scenarios. This critical pathway can be used retrospectively to evaluate the potential of tissue donation, assess performance in the tissue donation process and identify areas for improvement. It sets the basis to build indicators to compare organizations, regions and countries. The critical pathway can also be used prospectively to promote good practices in tissue donation programmes aimed at covering the tissue transplantation needs of patients.

Cornea donation in Germany: Obtaining consent.

Tissue donation is important to reverse cornea-related blindness. Unfortunately, the willingness to make a decision concerning organ and tissue donation while still alive remains low despite all efforts. By analyzing anonymized archived data from 25 654 next-of-kin interviews from our database over a period of 5 years (2013-2018), it was found that only 20.8% of all potential cornea donors have declared their own wishes. While still alive, refusal was communicated more often than consent by potential donors. Overall consent rates were 39.2%, with parents and siblings consenting more often than other relatives and females refusing more often than male family members. Personal interviews and interviews via telephone handled by staff known to the family resulted in better consent rates (up to 75.6%) with male interviewers receiving higher consent rates in general. The gender of the approached relatives in relation to a male/female interviewer was of low importance. The results also show that it is important to allow discussion about that topic between family members-the more relatives that were involved the higher the probability of consent.