Asked by: Rosie Duffield (Independent - Canterbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of including wombs on the list of routine organ donations included for transplant by the NHS on women's health.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) is responsible for organ donation across the United Kingdom.
In the UK, womb donation for transplant is not included in the standard organ donation process and is therefore not part of routine deemed consent. Donations for new types of transplants are only undertaken following a special and/or additional voluntary request to a family. It is also usually done for specific research programmes where people die in very rare circumstances and where a particular kind of donation may be possible.
The Department has worked in collaboration with National Health Service hospitals like Imperial College Healthcare Trust and Oxford University Hospitals in facilitating womb transplant research and clinical trials, however, it is not yet a standard NHS treatment and there are no current plans to include womb transplants on the organ donation register.