Elizabeth Ward (British campaigner)

Elizabeth Despard Ward (Wynd; 11 October 1926 – 20 July 2020) was a British healthcare campaigner known for pioneering organ donor cards and founding the charity Kidney Care UK. She helped raise £70 million for hospital renal units, including at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Ward also advocated for the UK's introduction of opt-out consent for organ donation.

Timbo, donor card, and charity founding
Ward's son Timothy, whom she called Timbo, started receiving dialysis treatment when his kidneys failed in 1970. A medical recommendation of a high protein diet incorporating foods like steak and cream led Ward to consider the financial challenges that many families with a sick child would face. This led her to start fundraising for renal causes, initially under the auspices of the existing National Kidney Research Fund, now Kidney Research UK, in 1971.

In the summer of that year, Ward placed an advertisement in the personal column of The Times looking for a donor kidney for Timbo. In Ward's book, Timbo: A Struggle for Survival, she explains that her true intention here was to gain press attention for the cause of kidney patients. The advertisement read "A donated cadaver kidney of [his] tissue type will release an eighteen year old from the wretchedness of his [dialysis] machine". The next day their story was published in the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, and Daily Mail.

Ward also began writing to the then Secretary of State for Health, Sir Keith Joseph. She shared with him an example of an American kidney donor card she had received from a US-based friend, and asked that he consider introducing similar in the UK. Ward followed up explaining that Timbo had attended Harrow School with Joseph's son James, and asking him to consider how he would feel if their roles were reversed. Soon after, she was invited to a meeting with senior civil servants to discuss what became the Government's Kidney Donor Scheme, with accompanying donor cards.

By 1974, Ward had realised that there was a need to add to the work being done by the National Kidney Research Fund with an organisation focused on kidney patients themselves. With input from her friend Robert Platt, former president of the Royal College of Physicians, she began to develop a plan for a charity called the British Kidney Patient Association, which would launch the next year. In 2017 it was relaunched as Kidney Care UK.

Fundraising
David Prosser, Vice Chair of Kidney Research UK, recounted a 1980s conversation with Ward in which she explained her fundraising approach: "Don't ask, don't get". With this attitude, and persistent phone calls over a period of three years, Ward was able to convince Biddy Baxter, producer of the children's television programme Blue Peter, to dedicate its 1982 Christmas appeal to raising money for young people suffering kidney failure. Ward wrote that this raised £2.5 million. It also led to 8 million "treasure parcels" being sent from children in the UK to provide equipment for over 20 hospitals.

It was reported that in total Ward's work raised £70 million, which was put towards funding renal units at hospitals in London, Birmingham, Crawley and Glasgow.

Opt-out consent
Ward said that she had believed that "once everybody knew there were 1,200 patients on dialysis waiting for their chance to lead a proper life that everybody would carry a [donor] card". This turned out not to be the case: in 1991 Ward wrote in The BMJ that only 7% of the UK population carried them. Doctors were also reluctant to discuss the matter of donation with deceased patients' recently bereaved family members. Discussions with patients, doctors and ethicists on this topic led Ward to conclude that an opt-out system was the only possible solution to the shortage of donor organs. Under such a system, people would be assumed to be willing donors after their death unless they opted out by adding their name to a register of dissent.

She compared the legal debate on the topic to the introduction of seatbelt legislation in Britain. This had had the full support of medical professionals, which Ward said meant it passed through Parliament with ease despite objections on the grounds that the law would restrict the freedom of the individual. She wrote that "there will be a continuing waste of life" until the same support is given to opt-out legislation.

Ward claimed that an opt-out system would save millions of pounds for the NHS: a kidney transplant costs half as much as a year of dialysis, and such a system would enable the 5,000 people awaiting the availability of kidneys for transplant to be matched with a suitable donor organ much sooner.

She continued to argue for this approach throughout the nineties and into the 2000s. In 2008 her views were cited in multiple Parliamentary debates on the topic by Evan Harris.

The Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Act was enacted in May 2020. Former Chair of Kidney Care UK Sally Taber later said how pleased she was that the law was passed in Ward's lifetime, and that to celebrate Ward "popped a bottle of fizz".

Patient advocacy
In addition to advocating for her son, The BMJ described Ward's support of other vulnerable patients as having a "near fanatical zeal". This extended to making threats: of "eternal damnation" for an order of nuns who would not fund the dialysis treatment of a homeless man, and of going to the press for a hospital that would not install a dialysis machine.

She was reunited with one such patient when she appeared on the BBC's This Is Your Life in 1997. The last guest on the programme was a woman who, years before at the age of 6, had received dialysis and a kidney transplant when Ward acted for her. The woman had previously been refused a transplant due to personal judgements of her family by a medical consultant.

Personal life
Ward married her husband Nigel, whom she had met playing tennis, in 1952. The two of them founded a meat-canning business where she worked as sales director, which her BMJ obituary linked to her fundraising prowess – "in essence, a massive selling operation". Timbo Ward's third kidney transplant was with an organ donated by Nigel, his father.

In the 1978 New Year Honours, Ward was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for her work with the British Kidney Patient Association.

Prior to her work on nephrology-related issues, Ward had campaigned for The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.