Lee Shepherd
Social psychologist at Northumbria University. First author of the 2014 panel study comparing organ donation across forty-eight countries.
Who they are
Shepherd works on health psychology and on the social factors behind donation behaviour. The 2014 study, written with Ronan O'Carroll and Eamonn Ferguson, tracked deceased and living donation across forty-eight countries over thirteen years.
It contains the finding the popular account leaves out entirely.
Key papers
Shepherd, L., O'Carroll, R. E., & Ferguson, E. (2014). An international comparison of deceased and living organ donation/transplant rates in opt-in and opt-out systems: a panel study. BMC Medicine, 12, 131.
Key ideas
Opt-out countries had more deceased donors, around fourteen per million people against about ten.
They also had fewer living donors, around five and a half per million against more than nine. Total kidneys transplanted still came out higher under opt-out, so the policy looks defensible, and the effect is not the simple one-way gain it is usually described as.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1186/s12916-014-0131-4