n New Zealand there is an average of 8.7 organ donors per million people which means that we have one of the lowest donor rates in the world. There are more people waiting for organs than there are organs available. Some will wait for a number of months while others will have to wait for a number of years for an organ to become available and some will die waiting. Through my research, I have found out that the main reason for this issue in New Zealand was because of the informed consent rule for organ donations in New Zealand. In New Zealand, the only way to become a donor is to state that you are an organ donor while getting your drivers license. But ticking ‘organ donor’ on your driver’s license application basically means nothing. Even if you have ticked to be an organ donor unless you have given informed consent prior to becoming brain dead, the decision passes over to the family and they will decide whether to donate your organs or not. This is one of the main reasons why it is so hard to become an organ donor in New Zealand and this is why we have one of the lowest rates of donation in the world. To resolve this issue, I thought the best and possibly the only way without changing the rules, is to create awareness. I wanted to create awareness and get people talking to their family and friends to ensure their decision to donate can be followed after their death. For the campaign that I have created, I focused on the people’s frustration of waiting. There are so many people who are waiting for organs and I wanted to put the audience in their shoes and just think about how they must feel. To do this I searched for locations where people experience waiting. And then I placed advertisements that stated their frustration of waiting to gain their empathy and consent, and from their introduced the people who are waiting for organ donations. This allowed the audience to portray their feelings and frustrations of waiting for the donors who are and have been waiting for months and years for an organ to become available. After creating the awareness and getting people thinking, the booklet was to be handed out that old more in-depth information about the issue and what we need to do to solve it. The solution was to get people talking to their family and loved ones to ensure their decisions to become a donor. In the booklet, I have placed stickers that you can place where ever people can see to allow them to know that you are a donor and your willingness to donate your organs.
