Facebook’s new timeline profile design has received a series of life-changing additions, allowing users to now add more personal details to their Life Events, such as quitting a habit, overcoming illness or becoming an organ donor.
The new “Health and Wellbeing” section was announced by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this week and the section has since appeared under the Life Event option on new post window – or that bit that asks “What’s on your mind?” Beneath categories such as Work and Education and Family and Relationships, you can now advise your friends on whether you are an Organ Donor. So in the event that you don’t update your status for more than a day people will know which bits of you are up for grabs if you actually happened to be dead!
In seriousness, the new Organ Donor option is aimed at upping willing donors and making donor information more accessible to benefit patients, 1000 of which sadly die each year in the U.K when suitable or willing donors haven’t been found in time. Facebook wants to encourage our socially savvy society to use this new feature to offer (legit) information which will be used in cooperation with NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) should one of our friends or a strange in need requires a life-saving transplant of heart, liver, kidney or more.
Facebook says “More than 30 million people in the UK will be able to show on their Timeline that they are either on the organ donation register already, or can register with the NHS on their Facebook page in a few simple steps. We hope that as a result of this partnership, UK Facebook users will together be able to reduce the number of people who needlessly die waiting for an organ each year.”
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