Order of the Bath

For longer than I can remember, I have carried a Donor Card in my wallet—I have just looked and mine is dated 17 Apr 1986. They were easy to get and quite high profile; on the counter in doctor’s surgeries, dentist’s, blood donor sessions, even non medical places like pubs, newsagents etc. sometimes had them.

Today they are saying that there are nowhere near enough donors and perhaps we should change over to an opt-out system where permission to donate is assumed unless you have made a declaration that you do not want to. I don’t disagree with the idea but in passing I picked up another clue—the NHS Organ Donor Register. I had never heard of it! Is it now true that it is no longer good enough to carry a card but you have to be signed up to some online database? I don’t think I like that idea*. Perhaps that is why the number of available donors is so low.

* I have had a look at the registration web site and, despite the announcement that it uses Digi-Sign and so is secure, that is an illusion. The information required is Name, DOB and Address. This is fairly public information; anyone could fill this in. DOB is a bit harder to obtain, but is not fully private.

This entry was posted on 16 Jan 2008 at 09:37 by Rick and is filed under Miscellaneous, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.