Organ and Tissues Donation - Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Problem identification:

The primary problem of most Canadian provinces and particularly Ontario is the low rate of organ and tissue donation and that there is no sign of increase. This is mainly due to the lack of awareness of the public regarding the importance of organ and tissue donation. It is then associated with many secondary problems such as unable to covey a strong and impactful message towards the public to address the importance of organ donation, ineffective communication with families of potential donors and donors themselves, the lack of information made known to public in terms of the procedures of donations and success rates of surgeries, different religious beliefs that affects potential donors' decisions and also public mistrusting the medical system of hospitals. While approaching a valid solution to the current situation, some constraints and limitations were identified. One of which is the fact that Ontario in particular is one of the most culturally diverse province in Canada and this results to potential controversies associated with religious belief upon the issue of organ donation. Secondly, donation is an issue that cannot be forced, the decision is up to the donor to make and the only method that a hospital could do is to increase awareness to the public to achieve a marketing affect. Another significant limitation is the high cost that hospitals are using for identification and maintenance of organs. With the high cost and the low donation rate, it creates a more unfavorable situation for hospitals.

Quantitative and Qualitative analysis:

To gain more insights to the current situation, a set of quantitative and qualitative analysis was done to find out the cause and effect and main reasons of why organ donations rates are low in Canada. Firstly, according to statistics from hospitals in Canada, in this case, particularly in London the success rate of organ transplant has a promising percentage with the lowest being 58% for single lung transplant and a 91% for Kidney transplant.[See exhibit 1] This means that Canada's medical system's standard is effective. However Canadians does not seem to notice this as it is shown in a survey that despite having a significant 90% of people supporting the organ transplant system yet only 27%-30% out of those people went on to sign up for actual donation. This further proves that the public are not well informed with accurate information regarding the procedures and success rate of organ transplant. With this in mind, it is thus important to figure out how we should approach to increase the awareness of the public throughout the nation. In Canada, Saskatchewan despite having a low population, has the highest donor rates of 22 per million [See exhibit 2] as compared to Ontario, which is the most populated province but yet only achieved a 14 per million donor rate [See exhibit 2]. Looking into furthermore, in Ontario London has a high donor rate of 21 per million [See exhibit 4] which may be mainly due to