Pay packets, credit cards and census returns could play a part in a government drive to encourage organ donation, under proposals to be discussed at an emergency summit in the next few weeks.
The health secretary Alan Milburn announced the conference yesterday amid fears that the Alder Hey body parts scandal could discourage families from donating organs, exacerbating serious shortages in the number of organs available. At least 6,000 patients are awaiting transplants.
Patient and professional groups, health chiefs, business leaders and parents will all play a part at the London summit. It will look for possible solutions to the shortage of donors, such as putting donor cards in pay packets and allowing people to register via returns for the next census.
People can already volunteer as donors when they apply for a passport or driving licence or register with a new doctor. Some credit card companies include a question on their application forms.
But the conference will stop well short of endorsing the opt-out "presumed consent" model of donation practised in Spain, where people are assumed to have agreed to organ donation unless they explicitly withdraw their consent.
The Department of Health said the summit would tackle the increasing gap between the number of people awaiting treatment and the number of organs available. A dramatic fall in road accident fatalities and the ability to help patients who might previously have been untreatable have contributed to the disparity.
It will also help to make "absolutely clear" the difference between agreeing to organ donations for transplants and organs being retained after a postmortem examination.
Mr Milburn said the 8m donor card holders needed to have the confidence that they would be treated with dignity and respect.
"Although at the moment the Alder Hey scandal does not appear to have affected donation of organs, we do not want to become complacent," he said. "I want to step up our drive to get more donors so that vital medical advances are not halted and people whose lives could so easily be saved with a transplant are not left to die unnecessarily."
The announcement came as leading transplant surgeons voiced their fears that the Alder Hey scandal could lead to a fatal drop in donations. The heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub, of the Royal Brompton Hospital, in London, said he was concerned there had been no transplant operations at the Brompton over the past 10 days.
Sue Sutherland, a renal transplant surgeon and chief executive of UK Transplant, the NHS group which runs the country's transplant programme, added: "We are concerned that Alder Hey may have a negative effect on people's willingness to donate."
At present around a quarter of relatives refuse to allow organ donation. They are legally entitled to withhold consent even if their loved ones have registered as donors.
A Department of Health spokeswoman in effect ruled out the introduction of presumed consent.
"The summit will look at many issues, but I think there's a feeling that [the current method] is the most appropriate way of doing it," she said.
A spokeswoman for the British Medical Association, which first mooted the presumed consent model, said they would only favour its introduction "as and when the public supported it".
