The Alder Hey scandal has fuelled growing distrust of the medical profession - and desperately sick patients waiting for life-saving transplants are among those suffering as a result.

STEPHEN LEWIS reports on a growing problem

TRAGEDY so often strikes out of the blue. Ten years ago Philip Torrance's 19-year-old son Grahame was returning home on his motorbike for his tea. He never arrived. A tragic road accident left him with serious head injuries, despite the helmet he was wearing. He was rushed to Pinderfields hospital, where Philip and his wife joined him at the bedside. Grahame was in a coma - and after a few days it became clear he wasn't going to recover. Tests showed he was brain dead.

"The first thing that went through my head was, why the hell couldn't it have been me?" Philip, of Tang Hall Lane in York, says. "I'd had 50 years of life. Why couldn't it have been me? But life doesn't work like that."

When he was alive, Grahame had always said that if something happened to him, he would like his organs to be donated to help someone else.

So when hospital staff approached Philip about the possibility of donating, he had no reservations.

"Grahame had filled in a donor card and expressed his wishes to me about this while alive, so there was no hesitation at all about agreeing," he said.

"It was a comfort in a way. It didn't make it any easier, but it helped me cope with the grief."

Philip learned later that Grahame's heart and lungs had been successfully transplanted to a young woman in Leeds, and both kidneys had also been successfully used in a transplant.

"It made me feel my son's life was not completely in vain," he says. "He had given an extended life to someone else."

What worries the 61-year-old secretary of the St John Ambulance Association now is that fallout from the Alder Hey Children's Hospital organ scandal could undo years of good work in encouraging more people to think about being a donor.

Signs are that is already happening. Organ donations were already down in the Yorkshire region before Alder Hey - and in the month since the scandal erupted again only two organs have been donated in the region, where transplant co-ordinators would have hoped for five.

Yorkshire transplant co-ordinator Julie Jeffery says that pattern is being repeated on a national scale.

"Alder Hey has had a definite knock-on effect," she says.

The result is that desperately sick people hanging on for the chance of a life-saving transplant are being denied the opportunity.

Michael Hardgrave knows all about what it is like to wait, hoping against hope that an organ will become available.

For five years he was on dialysis because of severe kidney failure - and his condition was growing gradually worse.

"It is awful," he says. "You're kept alive, but that is the best thing you can say about it. One person described it as like having the flu all the time, because you're so weak and wobbly. And you never get better." Michael was lucky. His wife Angela was found to be compatible - and just over a year ago she donated one of her own kidneys. The operation transformed his life.

Thousands of other sick people languishing on transplant waiting lists across the country are not so lucky. They are the other victims of the outrage that was Alder Hey.

People like Sue Docwra. Sue, 36, of Clifton, York, had both kidneys removed in 1994 because of cysts, and has been on dialysis ever since.

She can't work or even do much housework because she is constantly tired.

For six years she has been waiting for her bleeper to go off to summon her for a transplant - and the long wait is taking its toll. "I'm aware now that when it is bad I tend to be worse - and mentally I have worse days now than at the beginning because you do tend to think it is never going to happen," she says.

"It can just stop you enjoying a good life."

According to UK Transplant, there are about 5,000 people like Sue across the country waiting for a transplant that could transform or even save their lives.

In Yorkshire alone, 428 people are waiting for a kidney transplant.

Transplant teams say more donors are desperately needed - and they urge people not to let distrust of the medical profession following Alder Hey put them off giving others the chance of life.

No one likes to contemplate the possibility of their own death - and for grieving relatives, being approached for consent for their loved one's organs to be used for transplant can be traumatic.

But Philip Torrance can testify to the sense of comfort that gave him.

Already there are between three and four patients waiting for every organ that becomes available. And unless more people do register as donors, the number of people suffering or dying needlessly will continue to grow.

Julie Jeffery is blunt. "Unless organ donation picks up," she says, " people on the waiting list will die."