A radical change in the system of organ donation under which all people would be considered a donor unless they explicitly said otherwise will move forward this week after backing from the Government’s health advisers and Gordon Brown.

A health department task force will propose on Wednesday that all hospitals should have organ donor co-ordinators specialising in the task of explaining to grieving families how the organs of their loved ones could be used to save others.

At present about a third of families refuse to give consent for the use of organs, even in cases where the dead person was carrying a donor card. In its 14 recommendations the task force will also recommend the creation of more teams expert in the area of organ retrieval.

The task force set up by Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, will go on to make recommendations in the summer on the system of “presumed consent” under which people would specifically have to opt out if they did not want their organs to be used after death. The move would be highly controversial, with patients’ groups and the Conservatives opposed to it.

Mr Brown voiced his sympathy for the plan and is urging a national debate on the change, although he believes that the families of dead relatives should have the right to block the use of organs. The likely change is being proposed because people are dying every day while on the waiting list for a transplant, and demand is growing.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister said that a system of “presumed consent” could save thousands of lives. “A system of this kind seems to have the potential to close the aching gap between the potential benefits of transplant surgery in the UK and the limits imposed by our current system of consent,” he wrote.

Almost a million more people pledged to help others after death by registering their wishes on the NHS Organ Donor Register, bringing the total at the end of last March to 14,201,229.

Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat MP, chairman of the All-Party Kidney Group and member of the BMA medical ethics committee, welcomed Mr Brown’s comments.

“Under an opt-out scheme, donors’ real wishes will be more often respected, more lives would be saved and grieving relatives will be spared the experience of making the wrong decision at the worst time,” he said.

Dr Harris said that too many people were “needlessly dying while waiting for organs”.

However, several patient groups, including Patient Concern, are against a system of presumed consent, arguing that it is not up to the State to decide what becomes of people’s bodies when they die.

Joyce Robins, of Patient Concern, said that presumed consent turned volunteers into conscripts and that the proposals did not tackle the problem of donor shortages.

“Presumed consent is no consent at all. We’ve worked for years to get a system of proper, informed consent in the health service in this country and Gordon Brown is willing to throw it all out of the window,” she said.

Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, said: “We don’t think a private decision, which is a matter of individual conscience, should be taken by the State.

“If people want to give the gift of life, that is their right, but it must be something that is a voluntary matter.”

The number of people waiting for organ transplants rises by about 8 per cent a year. Under the plan co-ordinators would identify possible donors, talk to bereaved families and inform the national transplant list.

Dedicated organ retrieval teams available 24 hours a day would also be established to work closely with the critical care teams in hospital. The proposed system is similar to that in Spain where three times more organs are available than in Britain.

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