Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. I share some of the concerns she has raised and indeed the Irish Kidney Association was also looking for this to be incorporated as an amendment. We had a good discussion on this on Committee Stage and I had a good discussion on this with the Irish Kidney Association. What I propose to do is not to bring it into the legislation as I do not think it needs to be in the legislation.

We can act on it quickly. The HSE's Organ Donation and Transplant Ireland publishes an annual report on organ donation and transplantation activity. I have asked my officials to engage with the Organ Donation and Transplant Ireland on expanding this report to include exactly the kind of information that Deputy Shortall and the advocacy groups have raised. This will include information on donation patterns, the reasons retrieval was not possible and the reasons transplantation was not possible, where appropriate - for example access to ICU, access to appropriate transportation, both for the patient, potentially, and for the organ. Separately, the National Office of Clinical Audit, NOCA, undertook a potential donor audit feasibility study which was published in March of last year. This developed into a larger potential donor audit survey which has just been published in the past few weeks. It was published in September. The report from this study will provide a much more in-depth understanding of exactly the issues we all are keen to get to the bottom of and that the Deputy has raised, for example, how the system of donation transplantation is working and where we need to see it improved. What I discussed with the Irish Kidney Association was that we would move this more robust or expansive report to an annual basis which is exactly what we are all trying to achieve here, as Deputy Shortall laid out in her contribution.

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