Hot topics in kidney transplantation by Dr. Dorry Segev – Paradigm 2: Strategies to find a living donor

The second paradigm was that they take the patients when they develop ESRD and put them on waiting list for the disease donor transplant and tell them its better if you find living donor. Its not helpful. If the patients can’t navigate the treatment of the pancreatic mass, how can they navigate finding a living donor. We need to help them with this. This is little bit less relevant in India right now because of restrictions you have donor- recipient relationship. However, some of the concepts are still applied to that an ultimately it may take some time, those restrictions will be lifted.

Around 10 years ago, we created concept of “live donor champion”. If one says, “come next week with living donor”, no one will come. Instead if one says, “come next week with somebody who actually cares about you, who wants to be champion and help you with this” then almost everybody turns up.

In a study involving 20 transplant centres, people who participated in this who had 7 times higher chance of finding a living donor than the people who did not participated in this. Infact, some of the champions became donors. So, champions would volunteer sometimes to donate to the person that they were advocating on their behalf.