Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Organs and elections in Israel

Assaf Romm wrote to me yesterday about a plan to solicit registrations for Israel's deceased organ donor list at today's national elections. If it works, it might make sense to rethink whether recruitment of deceased donors in the US should be mostly at the Department of Motor Vehicles...


"Adi (the Israeli organ donor card foundation) has decided to use election day (tomorrow) as an opportunity to register people as organ donors. 

"Here is the ynet article (in Hebrew): 


לראשונה: עמדות החתמה לכרטיס אדי בקלפיות


Assaf summarizes:
"This is a joint project invented by someone at the National Transplantation Center and approved by the Ministry of Health.
About 750 Adi representatives will stand near the voting booths and will help citizens to sign the organ donor card at the same time they come to vote. This is the first time it has been done in Israel (and I couldn't find examples in other countries by searching in Google). Due to the recent advertising campaign for the (relatively) new priority law and increased attention in the public, Adi foundation expects about 720-750 thousand new organ donors during election day (and if they'll do half of that, it will still be an outstanding achievement in my opinion)."
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Post-election update:
Assaf writes:

"First, either I made a mistake reading, or they made a mistake when they wrote the article which they fixed later on. The numbers were supposed to be from 720,000 to 750,000 but not as an estimate but as a difference (which makes much more sense), that is, they expected about 30,000 new organ donor card holders.
"Second, The actual output was 15,000 new organ donor card holders, so about half as much as they expected. That also means about 20 donors per representative, which is about one donor every half an hour. Frankly, I think this is embarrassing and I wouldn't expect any less than that by putting an Adi booth at any crowded shopping mall... They are still very happy of course." 

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