Organ Donation is an emotional subject.  For recipients of organs, there is an incredibly overwhelming feeling of gratitude to an unknown family who made the decision to donate their loved one's organs and save other peoples lives, at a time of high stress, emotion and tragedy in their own lives.

There is an excellent website for information about organ donation in New Zealand at http://www.donor.co.nz which we encourage you to visit.

If you want to be an organ donor, you can note this on your Driver's Licence, but you need to discuss this with your family too.  We have developed an unofficial Donor card that may assist you.

Experience

Here we want to share experiences relating to organ donors and organ donation from the perspective of the organ donors as well as the organ recipients. 

• The Services of Thanksgiving where Donor Families and Recipients come together to remember the Donors are very emotional.  The story of Stefan, a 16 year old from the Manawatu, was told at the Auckland Service in 2001. 

• We are privileged that a New Zealand family is willing to share their experience of organ donation, and you will be touched when you read Kerry's Story, the story of a young Kiwi woman who died in the prime of her life. 

• We also want to share with you some of the letters that we agonise over, when writing to our Donor Families.  What can you adequately say to the family that gave you the biggest gift in the world, the gift of life itself? 

• One of New Zealand's Transplant Donor Co-Ordinators has written about what it is like to be a Transplant Donor Co-Ordinator, which is both informative and reassuring, when discussing the support for the Donor Family. 

• A very well known international figure in raising Organ Donor Awareness is Reg Green, whose son died tragically in Italy in 1994.  Information about him and his work is available here, along with a specially written article about the recipient of his son's liver.