Doctors will try to persuade ministers at Westminster, Holyrood and Stormont to introduce an opt-out system for organ donation to prevent 1,000 deaths a year because of organ shortages.

The British Medical Association will lobby the three parliaments to follow the lead set by Wales, which in December introduced presumed consent for organ retrieval. Under this system people who die in hospital are presumed to have consented to their organs being used for transplantation unless they have expressly indicated otherwise.

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The doctors’ union believes that the dozens of lives estimated to have been saved in Wales since it adopted this approach means England, Scotland and Northern Ireland should do the same. The BMA voted at its annual conference to actively lobby to get the same approach adopted across the UK.

“As a doctor, it is difficult to see your patients dying and suffering when their lives could be saved or dramatically improved by a transplant,” said John Chisholm, chair of the BMA’s public health medicine committee, who proposed the motion. “It is even more difficult when we know that lives are being lost unnecessarily because of poor organisation, lack of funding or because people who are willing to donate organs after their death simply never get around to making their views known, resulting in relatives making a decision without knowing whether the individual was willing to donate.”

Figures from UK Blood and Transplant, the NHS agency which manages organ transplantation, show that 6,485 seriously ill patients are currently on the waiting list to receive a new organ. Three people a day die because they do not get a new liver, heart, lungs or other body part.

Thirty-one people who died in Wales between the start of December and the end of May donated 60 organs between them. Of these, 10 had their consent presumed because they had neither opted out nor joined the organ donor register. (That figure was up from 23 donors in the same six months the year before.) Of the 60 organs, 32 came from the 10 people whose consent was presumed under the new set-up.

NHS Blood and Transplant said: “We welcome activity that encourages people to discuss organ donation and to donate their organs for transplant. Our role is to work within whatever legislative frameworks are in place across the UK.”

Meanwhile, Mark Porter, chair of the BMA, faces being ousted on Thursday amid discontent in the organisation, with members suggesting he is too “detached and remote” and has not done enough to highlight growing problems in the NHS.

Porter, who has led the 170,000-strong doctors’ union for the last four years, is being challenged as chair of the BMA’s ruling council. JS Bamrah, a senior NHS consultant psychiatrist in Manchester, is seeking to replace him.

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BMA insiders say it is “50/50” whether Porter, a consultant anaesthetist in Coventry, secures the required 17 votes when the 33-member council debates the issue at lunchtime on Thursday. A group of up to possibly 10 council members are disillusioned with his leadership, claiming he has become out of touch with many grassroots doctors and saying they are keen to see a change.

The council’s four representatives of NHS junior doctors, whom sources say are undecided about which way to vote, are likely to prove significant in determining if Porter stays for his fifth and final year in office.

Bamrah declined to speak to the media ahead of the vote. His Twitter account says his passions include the “NHS, mental health, parity and diversity”. If he wins, he is set to lead the BMA for three years.