The current system for how organs are distributed is 20 years old.   Meanwhile, waiting times have dramatically increased due to the number of people needing kidney transplants.  Several changes were recently recommended to the system, including efforts to match people with transplants so they last for a longer period of time as well as a new focus on providing hard to match people with more of an opportunity for a kidney transplant than in the past. 

The KDPI- Kidney Donor Profile Index determines how a kidney will be classified based on the criteria of how long the transplanted kidney is likely to function.  Some of the criteria are age, height, weight, ethnicity, cause of death of donor and medical history (such as hypertension, diabetes, exposure to hepatitis C virus and serum creatinine).

One of the changes made to wait time is if you were actively listed on a transplant center (meaning you were evaluated and COMPLETED ALL THE REQUIRED TESTING) AFTER you started receiving dialysis, your wait time will now be calculated from your first date of dialysis.

Many people put off being listed because they feel that they need to get comfortable with their dialysis regimen before they do anything else.  This resulted in patients getting listed years after starting dialysis, which created more damage to their hearts and vascular systems while they waited for a transplant.

The goal of the recent changes was to improve opportunity for people needing transplants that would function longer and people with harder to match blood types.  Also, standard and expanded criteria definitions will no longer be used. 

United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), developed the following brochure regarding its kidney allocation policy in both English and Spanish.
·         http://www.unos.org/docs/Kidney_Brochure.pdf
·         http://www.unos.org/docs/Kidney_Brochure_Spanish.pdf