WASHINGTON (AP) - In a major effort to increase organ donation, federal officials are devising a national organ donor card that they hope will make clear potential donors' wishes.

The idea is to give transplant coordinators a stronger case for proceeding with donation, regardless of a family's permission, by making the donor cards legal documents that carry more weight than a driver's license or unofficial donor card.

It is one element of a plan that Tommy Thompson, secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, plans to make public later this month, according to an agency official speaking on condition of anonymity.

It also is likely to involve a media campaign, an effort to work closely with businesses and states to promote donation, and new ways to encourage increasingly popular living organ donations. In addition, the budget President Bush is sending next week to Congress will include an additional $5 million for organ donation and transplant activities, an increase of 33 percent.

Since taking office, Thompson has talked regularly about organ donation, prodding his audiences to sign donor cards.

``It's odd to me that in America, this most compassionate country in the world, we have so many people that are dying because of lack of organs,'' he told reporters last week.

More than 75,600 patients are waiting for organs, and more than 6,000 of them die each year. The number of waiting patients has grown five times as fast as the supply.

Much of the effort to increase donation has focused on getting Americans to think about donation ahead of time and to talk to their families about what they would want.

The national donor card would represent a more structural change, aimed at helping the transplant coordinators who talk with families about donation.

The card would give those coordinators, when dealing with families, ``a really strong basis for saying, `We intend to proceed unless you have a strong predisposition otherwise,''' said the department official who described the plan.

Now, most transplant coordinators will tell family members if their loved one signed a donor card but will leave it to the relatives to decide whether to abide by the deceased's wishes.

The new cards would allow coordinators to go a bit further, the official explained, by presuming that someone who has a signed card will become a donor unless coordinators are told otherwise.

The cards would include a place for witnesses to sign and for donors to specify which organs they wish to donate and whether they want to include tissue and eyes.

The idea is to give the documents more legal weight and to prompt families to discuss the issue in a manner worthy of a legal document, officials said.

Anything that prompts discussion is likely to be helpful, said Susan Gunderson, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations and director of a Minnesota organ bank.

Most families that know their loved one's wishes are likely to honor them, she added, but the new donor card could break the tie in families that disagree about whether to donate.

Federal officials say the cards would supplement, not replace, the donor cards that now exist, and could become a model for states or others that wish to adopt them. They would be handed out at events where donation is promoted through other parts of the initiative.

The department also wants to find ways to help coordinators find out whether a potential donor has signed a donor card. Some states have registries, but not all are easily accessible, especially after business hours or from another state.

But Thompson is unlikely to recommend a national registry, at least not initially, given that it would be expensive and of questionable effectiveness, officials said.

Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.