Page 450 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 February 2020
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awareness raising. This includes annual services of remembrance, one of which is being held this coming Saturday. There is also the annual Gift of Life walk being held next Wednesday, and now in its 14th year—an opportunity for awareness raising and commemoration—and there is the Gift of Life garden at the National Arboretum, a place of quiet reflection to acknowledge and commemorate organ and tissue donation.
It has been an honour and a privilege to attend these services and walks, and to have officially opened the Gift of Life garden in late 2018. However, donor families and advocates here in the ACT and across the country have raised with me that, apart from an acknowledgement letter, usually from the hospital via DonateLife, there are few formal, tangible avenues where the significance of the donation is acknowledged. As a result, some families have reported that they feel that the significant decision and the significant gift of organ donation are under-recognised.
So, with my very first private member’s bill I am proposing to amend the legislation to go to some way to change that for families. I believe this is an Australian first. This bill creates a new section 38A in the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act to provide families with two formal opportunities to have the organ or tissue donation of their loved ones acknowledged. The first opportunity for recognition is that, on request in writing by a next of kin of the deceased person together with verifying information, the Registrar-General must include in the death register a statement that a person was a tissue donor, with “tissue” being the technical term for organs and tissue. The reason for including this in the death register is that only information that is in the death register can be included on a death certificate issued by the Registrar-General. So, on the occasion of the Registrar-General entering this information into the death register, families will then be able to apply for a death certificate which reflects that their loved one was a tissue donor.
“Verifying information” is very deliberately not defined in the bill. This is because what might be information that verifies the donation and the donor may change depending on the time and nature of the donation, but examples include acknowledgement letters and consent forms. The second opportunity is that, as part of the request for death register inclusion, the next of kin has an option of requesting a written acknowledgement from the Chief Minister, via the Registrar-General, provided that they do this in writing and provide their name and address.
The notion behind a letter from the Chief Minister is that it is a letter from the leader of the Australian Capital Territory personally acknowledging, on behalf of the ACT, the significance of the decision, and the significance of the gift of the person who had died, no matter whether the donation occurred while the deceased person was living, or on the occasion of death. Like the acknowledgement on the death register and then a death certificate, this would be formal, tangible. It would mean that the head of this jurisdiction not only was aware of the decision and the gift, but took the time to acknowledge it formally.
I need to stress two important aspects of these opportunities for formal acknowledgement. The first is that these opportunities are optional. I absolutely accept that, for some families, the acknowledgement they currently receive may well be sufficient, so there is no obligation for families to have these acknowledgements occur. They will only come about at the request of the next of kin.
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