Ethics Of Organ Donation Essay

Words: 1131
Pages: 5

When an individual experiences a grave insult to the brain, that individual has the potential to experience physical death. If the individual is a candidate for organ procurement, a certain set of criteria must be met to declare brain death. The United States Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) of 1981 defines death when an individual meets one of two requirements. The first requirement is that the person has experienced an irreversible termination of the circulatory and respiratory functions. The second requirement is that the person has experienced irreversible termination of every function of the brain, including the brain stem (Nair-Collins, 2010).
Organ procurement criteria are necessary to determine if an individual meets the criteria of brain death. Once the individual has been determined to be brain dead, an organ procurement procedure can be initiated. The criteria for death involve clinical indicators of neurologic function. According to Nicely and DeLario (2011), the clinical indicators involve cranial nerve and apnea testing, in conjunction with a full clinical
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Organ donation from an individual can impact the lives of up to ten recipients (Wakefield, Watts, Homewood, Meiser &. Siminoff, 2010). There are numerous ethical implications to consider. One issue this nurse had not considered was introduced by Mike Nair-Collins in his 2010 article. He postulates that turning off a ventilator on a brain dead, but not biologically dead, patient is equivalent to murdering the person. Having been present at the end of a patient’s life many times, this nurse has wondered the same thing. I have wondered if brain death is biological and spiritual death. It seems that the most appropriate way to determine the legitimacy of organ donation is through informed consent by the donor, while the donor is alive. In that way, the donor is aware of the repercussions of the