Tag: Donor Shield

Paired Donation Options: Guest Blogger, Martha Gershun

I am very pleased to share this space with a fellow living donor/donation advocate (BTW, her excellent book, Kidney to Share, belongs on your bookshelf right next to The Insider’s Guide to Living Kidney Donation).

Beyond direct donation: what if your friends and family don’t match?

September 28, 2023

By Martha Gershun, Guest Blogger 

As a living kidney donor, I often hear from people who have recently been diagnosed with End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) or have a relative who is a kidney patient.  These patients have usually been given little information about the advantages of living kidney donation and almost no guidance on how to maximize their chances of finding a donor.  Many providers, who are highly experienced in the medical and surgical aspects of the procedure, have limited resources to help patients implement a successful donor search.  Not surprisingly, they do not tell patients that other transplant centers may have a model that offers a better chance of finding them a kidney.

Family and friends often want to help, but finding a match can be hard. Even close biological relatives, such as siblings, may not match.  The odds of a potential donor matching with a non-biological relative or friend can range from 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000, depending on the patient’s blood type and other immunological markers. Upwards of one-third of willing donors are not compatible matches for their intended recipients.

There are several ways these generous people can still donate to benefit their designated kidney patient.

Many transplant clinics manage their own databases to form kidney pairs or chains, putting together a prospective donor/recipient pair with another donor/recipient pair (or multiple pairs in the case of kidney chains) to form matches.  These heroic efforts can result in several transplants over a very short period of time.  However,  they rely on the hospital to find these matches within their own patient population.

There are also national nonprofits that work to find matches across hospital systems for pair or chain exchanges, significantly expanding the set of possible donors.  The largest of these organizations, the National Kidney Registry (NKR) lists thousands of potential donors. If a kidney patient has a willing donor who is not a match, that person can donate through the National Kidney Registry to generate a voucher, which allows the patient they intend to benefit to receive a matching kidney from someone else on the Registry.  Often these vouchers are “redeemable” within weeks or months, allowing the intended kidney patient to receive a new kidney very quickly.

The National Kidney Registry also has a program called Donor Shield, which provides a multitude of benefits to the donor, including reimbursement for travel, lodging, and dependent care; reimbursement for lost wages; the possible opportunity to donate at a hospital closer to home; home blood draws; and significant support beginning with the medical and psychological evaluation for all prospective donors and extending past the surgery.

Participating in the National Kidney Registry requires the patient to be listed at one of the 102 Transplant Clinics that are paying members of the National Kidney Registry.

The Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation (APKD) does similar work, facilitating paired or chain exchanges through its network of transplant clinics in 24 states. Donors who donate as part of an APKD kidney exchange are eligible for a robust package of support and protections that include wage reimbursement; travel expense reimbursement; and donor and companion life, disability, and complication insurance.  Non-directed donors also receive APKD’s KidneyPledge, which comes in several forms, including an Advanced Donor Pledge, which will provide the opportunity to participate in an APKD kidney exchange for one named individual with known kidney disease, for the life of the named individual.

The benefits to this process are so significant – for the patient, who will likely find a living donor much faster, and for their donor, who will have the benefits of NKR’s Donor Shield or APKD’s KidneyPledge, that I encourage kidney patients to seek out a transplant clinic that is affiliated with one of these nonprofits, even if they are already listed elsewhere or have to travel to do so.

Finding a living donor can be difficult, but staying creative, flexible, and persistent can make it easier.

Martha Gershun is a nonprofit consultant and writer living in Fairway, KS with her husband Don Goldman. Her most recent book, Kidney to Share (Cornell University Press, 2021), with co-author John Lantos, MD, details her experience donating a kidney at the Mayo Clinic to a woman she read about in the newspaper. Gershun serves on the Expert Advisory Panel for the Kidney Transplant Collaborative and serves on the Board of the National Kidney Foundation Serving Kansas, Oklahoma, and Western Missouri.

Don’t All Donors Deserve Donor Shield?

I’ve been emailing, calling, and visiting state legislators and members of Congress for a long time about supporting and protecting living donors. I don’t mean the feel-good kind of support that calls us “heroes” and “awesome folks” but takes no action. I’m talking about finding meaningful ways to remove hurdles that can be deal breakers for so many people who might otherwise consider donating their kidney. While Congress and legislators have been dragging their feet, a terrific model plan has been hiding in plain sight: the National Kidney Registry’s Donor Shield.

First, a little background that may be familiar to some of you: nearly 100,000 people in this country wait years for a kidney, but only about 23,000 kidney transplants were performed last year. Meanwhile, thousands die every year because they didn’t get a kidney (or other organ) in time. For the foreseeable future, our best hope of dramatically changing those appalling odds is through living donation. So, simply put, we need to make it easier for people to manage being live donors.

Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

How? For starters, by providing paid leave for all living donors for donation-related time off work–not just for federal and some state employees (not everyone has paid sick leave, and those who do shouldn’t have to use up their leave time); reimbursing for travel and lodging costs if donating far from home; and covering “incidental” expenses (which can feel anything but incidental: think childcare or eldercare).

You may already know that NKR facilitates paired donation (aka kidney swaps) through the world’s largest database of potential recipients and live donors. If you’ve never heard of Donor Shield, remember that name even if you don’t plan to be part of a paired donation. NKR automatically provides Donor Shield, which encompasses those common-sense protections and so much more, to all its living donors. But if you donate at any of the 90 U.S. transplant centers that’s affiliated with NKR– even if you’re not part of a paired donation!–you would get Donor Shield, too. I’m happy to see that the University of North Carolina Hospitals, where I donated to my son in 2006, is now affiliated with NKR.

The transplant center pays the Donor Shield premium, so there’s no charge for the donor. And there’s no cost to the recipient either. I hasten to add that, because I was shocked–and infuriated–to learn that the National Living Donor Assistance Center bases its eligibility for donor assistance on the recipient’s household income. NLDAC apparently figures that the recipient, who’s already contending with surgery and lost work time, should simply reimburse the donor for any such expenses.

In addition to the benefits and protections for living donors mentioned above, which legislators and federal agencies have been studying for years, Donor Shield also includes additional attractive features, such as providing legal support in the unlikely event that a donor is fired for taking time off to donate or encounters insurance discrimination; and in the rare event that a donor later needs surgery for a donation-related complication that isn’t covered for any reason, Donor Shield will cover it along with lost wages, and travel and lodging expenses for the donor and a companion. That’s at any point, no matter how many years after the donation. And there’s no income-based eligibility for donor or recipient.

Not only are these measures the right thing to do, they obviously save lives by making more transplants possible and taking people off the waitlists. If the moral argument doesn’t sway the powers that be, the economic argument should. Shortening the wait for a kidney, and reducing or even avoiding time on dialysis, saves hospitals and the federal government millions of dollars.

Even if the transplant center you’re donating at isn’t affiliated with NKR, it’s worth asking if they would agree to provide Donor Shield (they can obtain it). The more donors who request it, the more likely centers are to get on board. If only paired donation, NKR, and Donor Shield had been available back when I donated!