HC Deb 16 July 1986 vol 101 cc554-5W
Mr. Gerald Bowden

asked the Secretary of State for Social Services in what ways the Chief Medical Officer's proposed voluntary code of practice regarding organ donors differs from the current practice, as laid out in the booklet "Cadaveric Organs for Transplantation", revised edition 1983.

Mr. Whitney

The code of practice "Cadaveric Organs for Transplantation", issued by this Department in 1979, and revised in 1983, is concerned primarily with criteria for establishing brain-death. The Chief Medical Officer wrote earlier this year to the medical profession's representative bodies requesting their views on a voluntary code of practice under which doctors would agree, whenever a patient who was clinically suitable as an organ donor died, to ensure that the relatives were asked for permission for the organs to be removed.