It was always a travesty that hundreds of people die due to a lack of transplant organs. An opt-out donation scheme in England was long overdue, says John Chisholm

More donations needed Stephen Barnes/Medical/Alamy

Hundreds of people die each year in England simply because of a lack of organs available for transplant. That’s why the organisation I work for, the British Medical Association (BMA), welcomes the government’s announcement of a “soft” opt-out system, something we have spent 18 years campaigning for. It could save many of those lives.

Our hopes were buoyed by Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech at the Conservative party conference in October. She said that 500 people died waiting for a transplant in 2016 and, to address this, the government would “shift the balance of presumption …