The last episode showed that digital solutions are only of limited help to people waiting for a donor organ. Host Rasmus Cloes discusses with Bremen's Senator for Health Claudia Bernhard which digital gaps politicians can fill. She draws on lessons learned from Bremen's successful COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
Claudia Bernhard begins by emphasizing that the legal framework for organ donation is regulated at the federal level. Nevertheless, she sees opportunities for action at the state level, particularly in targeted information and education efforts. Federal council initiatives could enable states such as Bremen to provide impetus at the federal level, but structural improvements at the local level are at least as important for raising public awareness of the issue.
She advocates a long-term, dialogue-oriented approach to strengthen public trust. With its vaccination campaign, Hashtag#Bremen has shown how successful education can work: through low-threshold communication, direct engagement in neighborhoods, and multi-perspective approaches that take cultural and linguistic diversity into account.
At the end of the conversation, the focus turns to the future: Claudia Bernhard advocates a prevention-oriented, neighborhood-based healthcare system in which organ donation is considered a matter of course, along with nutrition, exercise, and other issues. The key message is that only through continuous education, cultural sensitivity, and genuine investment in local healthcare structures can long-term social change be achieved—including in the area of organ donation.
A special feature of this episode: in order to shed light on this complex topic from different angles, we also included perspectives from Bärbel Fangmann (liver transplant recipient), Susi Knöller (senior physician and head of kidney transplantation) and PD Dr. Solveig Lena Hansen (university lecturer for ethics at the University of Bremen and member of the Standing Committee on Organ Transplantation at the German Medical Association).
