IT's never easy to broach the subject of death, especially when it's with the parent of a child taken too soon. It can be a difficult discussion.
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In Donate Life Week, to promote organ and tissue donation, it was a conflicting feeling to raise the topic with bereaved parent, Jeff Wilson.
He and wife Jenny had enacted the wishes of their son, Jamie, after he sustained injuries beyond repair in a Hume Highway crash in March.
Jamie wanted to be a donor, if anything ever happened. "It's not much use me taking it with me," he had told his mother some months earlier.
As they sat by Jamie's hospital bedside, where he was in end-of-life care, it reassured the Wilsons a little to know organ donation was his wish.
"It didn't make it easier, because it was still a difficult decision," Mr Wilson said. But "it was reassuring to us that we were making the right decision.
"I suppose that if we didn't have that knowledge of what he wanted, we would have felt doubt and guilt as to whether we'd made the right decision.
"We at least know we did make the right decision, because he had expressed his wishes."
The extended Wilson family now support Donate Life Week.
The week raises awareness for Donate Life, a program led by the Organ and Tissue Authority to improve transplantation rates and outcomes nationally.
Australia has an opt-in system, where potential organ donors must be first listed on the Australian Organ Donor Register (available at donatelife.gov.au)
Organ donor nurse coordinator for Canberra Hospital, Erin Wells, helped the Wilsons with their decision, whether to enact Jamie's donation wishes.
While families can make the decision to donate without their family member having registered as a donor, "it makes the decision a lot harder for them".
"Research shows that when the family knows the wishes, 90 per cent of the time they go ahead with them," she said.
"But when they don't know their wishes, it makes it a much harder decision for the family."
Australia's overall rates of organ and tissue donation are low for a developed country, for many reasons.
Only one in 100 hospital deaths occurs in circumstances that make the transplant of organs and tissues viable, for a start. Parliament revoked the declaration of donor intentions on NSW licences in 2012, inadvertently making it an overlooked issue. And, frequently, next-of-kin refuse to enact consent in the sorrow and confusion of a loved one's final hours.
Countries with an opt-out system may have higher donor rates, but not always comparatively successful transplant rates.
There's no easy answer, but it doesn't have to be a difficult discussion. Talk to the people you love about organ donation today, for who knows what tomorrow brings.
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