According to the latest report by the Health Ministry and the International Registry of Organ Donation and Transplantation, Spain leads the world in organ donations.

The standard used to determine this fact is the number of deceased donors per million people and for Spain, this figure was 34.2 for last year. This was the best figure for any country in 2008.

For the whole European Union consisting of 27 countries, the figure came out to be 18.2, while for United States of America, it stood at 26.3.

In Spain, the system of transplant coordinators had been started in 1989, and currently, it is provided in all of the 168 Spanish hospitals.

At present, the refusal rate for organ donation at the hospitals is 15 per cent as against 40 per cent refusal rate in the 1980s. However, the authorities are intended to bring it down further to 10 per cent in the near future.

Health Ministry has estimated that around 20,000 more lives could be saved each year, if the whole European Union follows the same system currently followed by Spain.