Central Florida sees spike in organ donations amid opioid epidemic

ORLANDO, Fla — It’s being called the silver lining of the opioid crisis; organ donations are up, hitting record numbers.

Organ donation officials say many of those donors are dying of drug overdoses. The national trend is playing out locally as Floridians face an opioid epidemic.

After spending more than a decade working alongside trauma patients and their families at Orlando Regional Medical Center, Chaplain Robert Ousley found himself needing life-saving surgery of his own.

Ousley suffered from congestive heart failure until receiving a new heart in 2015.

“My heart transplant gives me another opportunity to continue the ministry,” Ousley said.

His extension of life, of course, comes at a cost. His heart donor was just 30 years old. Though Ousley does not know how his donor died, statistics show a growing number of organ donations are a result of the opioid crisis.

“It’s tragic, because all of these are preventable deaths. While there is someone on the other end who is getting a life-saving transplant, we'd do anything to prevent these deaths from happening. These are young people, who are otherwise very healthy, and they shouldn't be dying,” said Kathleen Giery, LifeQuest's director of donor program development.

LifeQuest is the organ procurement organization that covers all of North Florida, including Marion and Putnam counties.

“We've had a significant increase here in the last few years. Last year, 16 percent of our organ donors were the result of drug overdose,” Giery said. “The year before that was 10 percent, and two years before was about 5 percent.”

Like LifeQuest, TransLife, which handles organ procurement for all of Central Florida, had 21 donors in 2017 who died of overdoses. For TransLife, that’s about 13 percent of all organ donor deaths -- more than double what they saw just two years prior, 6 percent in 2015. That was the same year Ousley received his heart.

“I don’t think anyone who is lucky enough to be a recipient is going to care if a person has an opioid problem,” Ousley said. “Even if this guy was in prison, or he was an opioid abuser, I praise the Lord for him being a donor, so that I could get this extension of life.”

All donated organs go through testing for infectious diseases, including hepatitis and HIV, so experts say there should be no concern about whether organs taken from an overdose death are safe.

Cox Media Group