1. Introduction

Organ donation is defined as giving an organ or part of an organ to be transplanted into another person. Organ transplantation is the only option to save lives in patients affected by terminal organ failures and improve their quality of life. However, there is a disparity exists between the supply and demand of donated organs, leads to a loss of many lives. The number of organ transplantation have gradually increased in the last two decades and provide excellent results in children and young adults, and are challenging by the growing proportion of elderly transplant patients with co morbidity. The results of organ transplantation continue to improve, as a consequence of the innovations and the improvements in peri-operative management.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Organ transplantation currently depends on the availability of human organs. Their scarcity means that there is a waiting list of almost 63,000 in the European Union, and over 100,000 people in the United States according to the recent survey. The process of obtaining organs for donation and transplantation purely depends on the resources of health services and by health professionals' performance in potential donor identification and management tasks. However, in accordance with the current legislation it is mainly subjected to a personal or family decision, strongly mediated by psychosocial processes. Therefore, the need to analyze and intervene both in the practices of the professionals involved in the process of organ generation and in the attitudes of the general population need to stressed and addressed [1–5].

The development of organ transplantation in the second half of the 20th century has been a remarkable achievement. Recently; organ transplantation is one of the most effective options for those with an end-stage organ failure. Its success has been basically dependent on public awareness, support and active participation. Without these factors, the efficiency of organ transplantation and the consequent saving or extension of lives would have undoubtedly

Organ Donation and Transplantation: "Life after Death" http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.76962 19

The number of patients in need of organ transplantation has increased at a rapid pace; in contrast, the number of available organs has increased only slightly. Expanded criteria for donor selection, such as older age, have resulted in more people who meet the criteria for brain death becoming organ donors although fewer organs are transplanted from each donor. Improvements in automobile and highway safety, as well as increased enforcement of gun control laws, have also contributed to a plateau in the number of young, healthy donors. Public education efforts that encourage organ donation may be effective in getting more people to sign organ donor cards, but most individuals who do so will never be in a position

Faced with increasing numbers of patients who need transplantation, deaths on the waiting list, and a fixed number of available organs, some transplant programs are working to increase the number of transplants from living donors. Although living donation has always been an option for some types of transplants, many programs have been reluctant to promote it, as living donation requires invasive surgery on a healthy person with associated risks of morbidity and mortality. For example, since dialysis is an option for patients with end-stage renal disease, surgery on a healthy donor may be difficult to justify, despite the dialysis patient's

The most important in organ donation is to maximize the psychological status and well-being of the donors before and after transplantation has become the foremost goal of all transplantation centres. The psychological issues that mainly concern with the living organ donation includes prevention of psychological harm, ensuring the donors are fully informed and decide to donate without coercion, monitoring donor psychosocial outcomes are intimately linked to the factors that historically served as barriers to use of organs from living donors. These barriers can be overcome by the motivating of the public and creating awareness and respon-

Organs that can be transplanted from the living donor includes one kidney, part of intestine, pancreas, islets of Langerhans, bone, part of liver, one testis, bone marrow and blood. The organ that can be transplanted from the deceased donor are heart, kidney, pancreas, stomach,

1. Autograft: Transplanting a person's tissues from one site and use it in another site of his body and is called autograft. For example, removal of skin from the legs and using it for

hand, skin, blood vessels, lungs, liver, intestine, testis, cornea and heart valve.

suffered adversely.

to become organ donors.

diminished quality of life.

sibility among oneself.

Types of organ donation

damaged skin face or other exposed part.
