SURGEON Bob Johnson stopped counting the number of transplants he had carried out when it got to 500 - and that was in the 1980s.

He's delighted that the first patient he gave a new life to at a Newcastle hospital back in 1967 is still alive and well 34 years later.

And he takes quiet satisfaction in the numbers that he has helped since then.

But in all that time he and fellow surgeons have been up against the same problem - a shortage of organ donors.

Mr Johnson moved to Manchester Royal Infirmary in 1974, to a kidney transplant unit, which has now carried out more than 3,000 swaps since 1968.

He has been at the forefront of taking the centre to its pre-eminent position in the UK and to becoming the largest of its type in Europe.

Now the medical director of the trust which runs MRI, he is backing the M.E.N.'s campaign to highlight the urgent need for donors.

The shortage is probably worse today than it has ever been thanks to improved road safety and fewer deaths from strokes.

Persuasion

But Mr Johnson is a great believer in persuasion and not compulsion to increase the numbers of those willing to become donors.

Despite the shortage, he is not in favour of putting pressure on patients' families, as is the case in some countries like Spain.

He explained: ''They hire doctors in training and they put them to work in key hospitals as transplant donor co-ordinators, but it is their job to go round the hospital each day, identifying potential donors and persuading families to agree to organ donation - and they get paid by their results.

''It has pushed the numbers up, but it is really very aggressive, and I don't think it would be acceptable here, though it has now been taken up in Sweden.''

His philosophy is that if families are approached in a sensitive way by trained staff who know how to broach the subject tactfully, most will agree to donation, and he now heads a body which has a training and education programme which does just that.

He said: ''It is better not to have enough organs than to push people into something which they don't really want to do and which they may later regret. I am not in favour of pressurising people.''

Mr Johnson stresses that the bodies of donors are treated with enormous respect and the organs are removed without disfiguring the donor.

Tweet