MP Dr Alexander Simidchiev wants the official register to also list people who explicitly agree, while alive, to donate their organs. Their relatives would then not be asked. He says he will work on the proposal with fellow MPs in parliament.
For now, the only official list is of people who have refused to donate organs.
The law allows anyone with confirmed brain death to become a donor, but in practice most doctors ask the family first. Simidchiev calls the question moral and ethical, but says relatives should know what the person wanted. About 20% of relatives who are asked at such a hard moment say "no". The MP says a refusal does not always reflect the wishes of the person who died, so everyone should be able to state their own will.
In a TV interview, he sent his daughter a message. He wrote that if anything happens to him, he wants to donate his organs, and that he loves her. That way, he explained, she will not have the responsibility of deciding for him.
In the past year, Bulgaria has not carried out a single transplant from a living donor. Simidchiev calls this terrible.
923 people are waiting for a transplant, about four times the number of MPs. Simidchiev says each MP should know the cases of about four people waiting in their area and how long they have waited, because a closer link with them would improve things.
Infections picked up in Bulgarian hospitals push many people to look for a living donor abroad, he said. The infections are not directly linked to transplants, but they get in the way. If a donor makes a sacrifice for a relative and the patient catches a severe, even deadly infection, the effort is wasted, the MP says.
Simidchiev called on the Health Ministry to change how transplants are organised. He says the "Transplants" department of the Medical Supervision Executive Agency is not a good structure. The MP wants a separate Transplant Executive Agency, as there was before, so that someone is there to do the work and take responsibility.
The transplant problem is easy to fix, Simidchiev says: in a year and a half to two years.