They are not ... exactly, telling the truth. In the US the average waiting time is 1121 days (3 years). This number is and can be misleading. If my kidney fails and I wait six months and receive a new one, and after a year, the new one fails, I go back on the waiting list and the six months gets tacked back on ... so the 2nd time I wait a year. Now my time is 1.5 years waiting for a new kidney. The time on a US waiting list is, on average, 3 years. In Canada it is 2.5 years. Now, introduce into this mix a new medical system that will weigh the costs and benefits of you receiving the kidney just made available. Under the old system (current) it is all based on time - under the new system, it would be based on more than just time on the list. It would also include your age and the benefit of you receiving the kidney versus someone who is 13.
Perhaps these sorts of lists should be based upon need - those in most critical need first followed by those in less critical need.
Oh and one more thought - as we age, we find ourselves in need of new parts. Lungs, hearts, kidneys. Unless we begin manufacturing these items, we tend to receive them from younger people (if a 50 year old gets hit by a bus and his kidneys are not damaged, there is a good chance they may already be worn by 50 years of living and may not end up as a permanent replacement). yet our populace in the US and Canada is getting OLDER and there are FEWER younger people taking their place ... ... ... ... do we see a problem brewing ... ... ... you should!!
Albertans dying while waiting for kidney donors
Transplants could save lives, dollars. 2.5 year wait.
21 Jan 2011
Calgary Herald
MATT MCCLURE
CALGARY HERALD
People are dying on the waiting list.
Calgarian Didja Nawolsky sets up a dialysis machine at her home Thursday. She spends five hours a day hooked up to the unit that cleanses her blood. And giving the Calgary mother and 430 other Albertans on the waiting list a new organ would save the province $21.5 million a year in health-care costs, according to a new report.
A Canadian Institute for Health Information study released Thursday finds Albertans with failing kidneys are more likely to get a transplant than most Canadians, but a shortage of donated organs means they still wait an average of 2.5 years for surgery.
“People are dying on the waiting list,” Nawolsky says.
“I want to be there for my daughter’s graduation, to grow old with my husband, but instead we all live each day with my mortality.”
While most cases of endstage organ failure are caused by undiagnosed high blood pressure and untreated diabetes, Nawolsky suffered irreversible kidney damage after falling ill in 2002 from a rare auto-immune disease.
Since a failed transplant in 2005 of a kidney donated by her sister, Nawolsky has been forced to spend five hours a day hooked up to a home dialysis unit that cleanses her blood and removes excess fluid from her body.
“You can have all the money in the world, but time is a gift,” she says.
“I spend a lot of it hooked up to a machine.”
The report estimates the annual cost of dialysis is approximately $60,000 per patient, while the average cost of a one-time kidney transplant is $23,000, plus $6,000 a year for the medication necessary to keep the organ working.
Over five years, the savings per patient with a transplant would be $250,000. If the 3,000 people on waiting lists across Canada received a new kidney, it would result in savings of $150 million annually, the report concluded.
But performing more transplants on patients like Nawolsky requires more donated organs, something scarce.
To that end, Dr. Nairne Scott-Douglas, a Calgary nephrologist, says Canada should consider implied consent legislation — similar to laws in Sweden and Spain — that would make a deceased person’s organs available for transplant unless they opted out in writing.
In spite of ethical concerns by some physicians, Scott-Douglas says Alberta should also follow the lead of other provinces that are transplanting organs from patients who have had heart attacks as well as those who are brain-dead.
“Society has become a safer place with fewer teenagers dying in motorcycle accidents,” he said.
“Alberta has a very high organ donation rate for deceased persons of around 26 per million population, but if it weren’t for the increase in living donors we wouldn’t have been able to keep pace with the need.”
Indeed, the study found that fully half the 3,723 patients in Alberta with kidney disease had received a transplant, compared to just 41 per cent nationally.
In the last decade, 744 Albertans have received a kidney form a deceased donor, while another 494 got a transplanted organ from a living donor.
“We need more people out there to know that if they’re interested there is a real need that can be filled by making a gift of one of your kidneys,” say Joyce Van Deurzen, executive director of the Kidney Foundation of Canada’s Calgary office.
“Studies have shown that people who donate live long lives with few or no complications.”
The study also found that Alberta had the lowest rate of end-stage renal disease in the country at 989 cases per million population.
Scott-Douglas says the low prevalence is due to the province’s relatively young population and programs begun in the 1990s that proactively screen and treat thousands of patients in Calgary and Edmonton who are prone to developing diabetes and hypertension.
“If a patient comes to you with 20 per cent kidney function, there’s not much you can do because that scar tissue doesn’t heal,” he said.
“Catching people early is the key.”
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