Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to my colleague's motion on organ donation, a topic that has already been the subject of a bill and a study in committee. Although I support my colleague's motion, as I said in my question, I am disappointed that he decided not to support the bill introduced by the Conservative member for Edmonton Manning in February 2016 and that he moved a motion on the same topic. It would have been more productive to support the bill and send it to committee, where it could have been studied immediately.
I took a look at this bill and the committee's report, which is quite interesting, and I have to say that the state of our health care systems really could have been expanded further. There is a lot of talk about donations, people who do not sign their consent card and public awareness campaigns. This is all worthwhile, but it is hard to talk about organ donation without talking about what is going on in our health care systems, especially in Quebec. The federal government has some responsibility there, and it creates an additional burden when it shirks its responsibilities, especially with respect to health transfers to Quebec.
Organ donation is a very demanding and technically complicated procedure, particularly when the donor is brain dead. First, the potential donor is assigned two nurses, who must have intensive care training and know how to use specialized equipment. Because timelines are so tight, the deceased's vital functions must be maintained until the organ can be harvested and transplanted into the recipient's body. When the individual is brain dead, the body must be intubated and hooked up to a ventilator, and the heart must be stimulated to beat.
These procedures require a lot of equipment and specially trained staff. Unfortunately, nurses in our health care system are already overworked. They work 16-hour shifts on understaffed wards. Emergency rooms are often two or three nurses short, and nobody is brought in to replace them. People miss opportunities to identify organ donors because it does not occur to them in the moment. It is a complex process, and a particularly onerous one for rural regions.
If we really want to raise organ donation rates, we need to take a close look at the state of our health care systems. Nurses are vital to the organ donation process. Say a person is brought to the hospital after an accident. The person is brain dead. For a transplant to happen, there have to be nurses available who are not overwhelmed by their other duties. Discussing the options with family members takes a person who has the time to explain the process calmly. Nurses cannot manage that if they are always running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
There are a lot of health care system issues we need to consider. Unfortunately, that whole piece has been left out of the puzzle. I realize that the provinces are primarily responsible for setting up these systems, but when the federal government dissociates itself by cutting health transfers to the provinces, that is kind of hypocritical. If we want to raise organ donation rates, we need to make sure our emergency rooms are not swamped and our people are not exhausted. That is where we need to start.
Most cases of organ donation that were not decided when the donor was living, and therefore were not planned and occurred because of unfortunate accidents, are identified in emergency departments. They occur because of the alertness of emergency room staff. These workers realize right away that there is an opportunity, and they immediately inform a doctor that someone is a potential donor.
We must also understand that practices in the health field have changed a great deal over the years. Staff are much less quick to initiate resuscitation procedures. Families often ask for resuscitation to be stopped. In such cases, the person was never brain dead. Had they continued with resuscitation, the person would have become brain dead and could have been stabilized and become a potential donor.
There is also a danger when the person had a disability or attempted suicide, for example. The danger is that the resuscitation manoeuvres will be successful but will leave the person with impairments. Often, families would rather stop resuscitation than run the risk of keeping the person alive in a vegetative state. In cases where the prognosis is dismal, families often ask medical professionals to stop resuscitation, which is done much more quickly than before.
Before, medical professionals were required to do everything in their power to save a life. Now they stop resuscitation much sooner, which means that the person dies. Distance and the time it takes to move the body means that it is unrealistic to expect organs to reach recipients in rural regions on time. Often, the only way for them to receive an organ from a potential donor is to keep the donor's system functioning. The donor needs to be in stable condition. Their blood pressure, heart rate, respiration or ventilation and oxygen saturation levels must be maintained.
A potential donor cannot be moved unless they are in stable condition. Doctors have to be able to stabilize them, which takes a lot of resources. Such resources are sometimes hard to come by in the case of an accident that happens in the middle of the night. That is the reality of the health care system, and I would like that to be taken into account when we talk about organ donation. We talk a lot about the people who have not signed an organ donor card, but we also need to carefully consider the reality of our health care system. I think we need to take that into account and understand that the provinces are doing their best with their health care systems. However, we are currently dealing with a major crisis.
We need only think of the overtime that nurses are required to do. That is a total disaster. Every day nurses are forced to remain at work even though they are exhausted and do not feel they can work or think. They are forced to work for 16 hours straight. Then we wonder why they do not have the clinical reflex to initiate the organ donation process when they are completely exhausted and the health care system is broken. The federal government pretends not to be aware of this; it is backing away from health transfers, claiming that the provinces alone are responsible for what happens in hospitals, that it is not its jurisdiction.
If women are forced to stay at work, if they cannot go pick up their kids, if they leave work in tears, or decide to change careers because they are completely exhausted, I think we have a problem. I sincerely hope that we also consider what is going on in our hospitals to try to fix our public health problems, which can be serious for many people. Some people might not look at our health care situation with blinders on, like they do now.
I urge people to step up and pay attention to the crisis in our hospitals.