A fair compensation. Consideration of a proposal to give live kidney donors priority for transpants

Patients in the Netherlands requiring a donor kidney spend three to four years on average on the transplant waiting list for a kidney from a deceased donor. Postmortem donor kidneys are in short supply. Consequently, over the past 15 years, it has increasingly been the case that living persons have donated a kidney. More than 58 percent of kidney donations in 2010 came from live donors. This development begs the question as to whether these donors ought to be given priority on the donor kidney waiting list in the event of subsequently suffering from severe renal insufficiency. This has been proposed by Eurotransplant, a collaborative organisation for the international exchange of donor organs, with which the Netherlands is affiliated. This led the Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport to request an advisory report from the Health Council of the Netherlands at the end of 2009. When allocating donor kidneys, are there any medically or morally valid reasons for taking into account that a person earlier in his life has donated a kidney? And is it legally possible to award these donors extra points on the waiting list?

Committee

• Prof. I.D. de Beaufort, Professor of Health Ethics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, chair
• Dr. F.J. Bemelman, Nephrologist, Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam
• Dr. J.C.J. Dute, Senior Lecturer in Health Law, University of Amsterdam
• Prof. J.W. de Fijter, Professor of Internal Medicine and Nephrology, Leiden University Medical Centre
• Prof. G.A. den Hartogh, Emeritus Professor of Ethics, University of Amsterdam
• M.A. Bos, Health Council, The Hague, advisor
• Dr. C.J. van de Klippe, Health Council, The Hague, scientific secretary