When Donated Organs Go to Waste

[LiberalArkie]

Many of the 17,000 people currently waiting for liver transplants in the U.S. have had bags packed for weeks, months, or even years, ready for the moment the phone rings and the voice on the other end tells them to head to the hospital. Once an organ becomes available, they know, there will only be a small window in which they can receive it. This year, an estimated 6,000 of those people will undergo a transplant; another 1,500 will die waiting for that call. There just aren’t enough livers to go around.

The task of determining who on the waiting list should receive a new organ falls to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a non-profit organization that coordinates transplants across the U.S. When a liver becomes available, someone from the organization enters the donor’s information—weight, blood type, geographical location—into a computer system, which spits out a list of patients who would be a good match. The program then ranks the patients based on an objective measure of illness, called a Model End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score. The patient most likely to die gets put at the top of the list, with first dibs on the organ. “It’s balancing equity in regards to patient access,” explained David Klassen, the chief medical officer of UNOS, “[while] making sure that the outcomes from the transplant surgeries are as good as possible.”

But access to organs is far from equitable. One of the biggest challenges UNOS faces is geographic disparity in access to organs—some parts of the country have far more organ donors than others, and organs can only be preserved and shipped for a limited time before transplantation. The country is divided into 11 Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) regions; across those 11 regions, typical wait times for organs across the country range from one year to more than six.

Snip

“You’re only accountable for the patients that you transplant. So if you don’t transplant somebody, you can’t get in trouble.”

Snip

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/when-donated-organs-go-to-waste/470838/

[femmocrat]

1. Meanwhile, advanced kidney disease is almost becoming an epidemic in this country:

ORGAN DONATION AND TRANSPLANTATION STATISTICS

There are currently 121,678 people waiting for lifesaving organ transplants in the U.S. Of these, 100,791 await kidney transplants. (as of 1/11/16) 1
The median wait time for an individual’s first kidney transplant is 3.6 years and can vary depending on health, compatibility and availability of organs.2
In 2014, 17,107 kidney transplants took place in the US. Of these, 11,570 came from deceased donors and 5,537 came from living donors.1

On average:
Over 3,000 new patients are added to the kidney waiting list each month.1
13 people die each day while waiting for a life-saving kidney transplant.1
Every 14 minutes someone is added to the kidney transplant list. 1
In 2014, 4,761 patients died while waiting for a kidney transplant. Another, 3,668 people became too sick to receive a kidney transplant.1

https://www.kidney.org/news/newsroom/factsheets/Organ-Donation-and-Transplantation-Stats