I’m so very happy.

The UK is desperately short of organs. At present, there are some 8000 patients on the organ transport waiting list - and more every year. These people will die without an organ transplant.

Introducing an opt-out system of donation, where it’s assumed you consent to organ donation after death unless you say otherwise when alive, could save many thousands of lives. I suspect that, in our current system of opting-in, many potentially useful organs are wasted. Some people don’t care about organ donation either way, and so don’t register for donor cards. Some people might consider donating, but don’t know how. Some people simply don’t think about organ donation, but might do it if they did. So we lose organs, and live with them.

This could save many lives. Of course, there are some, utterly puzzling, groups who feel that this is an infringement of patients’ rights. How? There’s an opt-out clause. People don’t have to give their organs if they don’t want to. Sure, there’s an onus on the state to now inform people that the system has changed and they need to opt out if they don’t want recycling. But it’s not as if the state is out there, digging up corpses and stealing their insides.

There is still a choice.

More than that though, how exactly does one infringe the rights of a corpse? This I am curious about. A conscious individual has rights and liberties. That is, to my mind, unquestionable.

But, is a corpse a conscious individual? I think not. Viewed in completely unsentimental terms, it’s a slab of meat.  Nothing more, nothing less - even in legal terms. Why shouldn’t that slab of meat be put to some use?  There’s no reason not to.  And, if you can stop someone else from becoming an unconscious slab of meat by using part of that slab of meat, every reason to do so.

So, bravo, for once.

Recently, David Cameron made a worrying suggestion for the NHS. He argued that hospitals should be fined for every patient that catches MRSA while in their wards. Of course, this approach to dealing with the superbug is nothing new. For some time now, the government has said hospitals should be fined for not meeting infection targets. However, it remains in my view a poor way of dealing with healthcare problems.

Superficially, Cameron’s proposal may have some merits. Certainly, it appears a more logical way of fining hospitals than that currently in place. I have a distinct aversion to centrally set targets, especially on difficult problems like MSRA rates. There are so many possible problems. The government might overestimate the progress physically possible in a given time-period, and end up fining the majority of hospitals unjustly. A hospital might make significant progress in treating MRSA, but not enough to meet the targets, and so still be punished for improving. NHS staff, desperate to meet targets to keep funding, might take shortcuts to do so, skimping on individual care to speed things up. The list goes on. In this regard, Cameron’s method is superior - at least it only penalises hospitals in actual cases of infection.

However, the issue is not how a hospital should be fined, but whether it should be. I cannot see the logic behind depriving a failing hospital of funds. It will be a, “means of hard-wiring infection control into the system,” its advocates say.

Really? It strikes me that, far from causing people to think again, it will simply breed resentment among NHS staff for making a hard job harder. And even if it does turn minds to finding solutions, what good will it do? The funds needed by hospitals to enact those solutions will have gone. How, for example, would hospitals provide extra training for porters on the rigorous hygienic procedures needed to combat MRSA without the money to do so? As the Conservatives themselves have been fond of saying, you can’t spend money that’s not there. The NHS is no exception.

Instead, the government should be helping failing NHS trusts. If MRSA rates are rising in a hospital, it probably means that the staff don’t know how to tackle the infection effectively. They therefore either need to be trained to do so, or sacked and replaced with trained staff. Both of these would require time, energy, and above all, funding. A failing hospital needs more funding, not less.

Do I expect either of the two big parties to do that? No. Their policies here only mirror their regressively populist attitudes to crime - recriminatory punishment which solves nothing. Those show no sign of changing, and neither does this. But that’s no reason not to hope, I suppose.