Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to work with international counterparts to ensure the sharing of best practice to increase organ donation.

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) - the United Kingdom organ donation organisation responsible for matching and allocating donated organs - actively participates and is involved in European Union initiatives to increase organ donation. This includes two current major European organ donation projects: the ACCORD (Achieving Comprehensive Coordination in Organ Donation) and FOEDUS (Facilitating the Exchange of Organs Donated in EU Member States) projects. NHSBT was also a collaborating partner for the completed ODEQUS (European Organ Donation Quality System) project.

The UK drew heavily on evidence of world-wide success, such as Spain, for the development and implementation of the Organ Donation Taskforce recommendations published in 2008, which saw donor rates rise by 50% in five years. A number of international experts from the Unites States of America, Germany and The Netherlands also contributed to the development of the UK's new strategy published in 2013 Taking Organ Transplantation to 2020. A number of measures will be used to track improvements in performance in organ donation and transplantation to compare with international benchmarks, in order to try and match the best performing programmes in the world.