The wait for kidney transplant recipients is often long. About 76% of transplants are done using a kidney from a deceased person, and waiting times of four to five years for a deceased donor kidney are common, according to Anne Paschke, media relations specialist for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a private, nonprofit organization that manages the nation’s organ-transplant system under contract with the federal government.
In Rhode Island, 286 candidates are waiting for a kidney transplant at the state’s transplant hospital, Rhode Island Hospital, Paschke said.
There were a record 24,670 kidney transplants in the United States last year, and the total number of kidney transplants so far this year is slightly ahead of the number at the same point last year, according to Paschke.
Fifty-one kidney transplants were done at Rhode Island Hospital last year; 16 of them were living-donor transplants, Paschke said.
From Jack Perry’s article “For This Cranston Doctor, healing the sick meant donating a kidney,” Providence Journal