australian organ donation performance

AUSTRALIAN ORGAN DONATION PERFORMANCE

AUSTRALIAN ORGAN DONORS & TRANSPLANT RECIPIENTS

Globally organ donation rates are measured in Donors Per Million of Population (DPMP) as this takes into account changes in population over time. In 2021, USA achieved 41.6 DPMP and Spain 40.2 while Australia only achieved 16.4 DPMP. In 2008, the government provided the funding “to establish Australia as a world leader in organ donation for transplantation”. After 13 years and about $600M injection of funds, Australia is still performing well below 50% of world leading practice.

ORGAN DONORS PER MILLION OF POPULATION

Over the 10 years there has only been a growth of 9.5 DPMP.

Year	Actual Number of Donors	Mid-Year Populations (Millions)	Donors Per Million Population (DPMP)
2008	259	21.4	12.1
2009	247	21.7	11.4
2010	309	22.0	14.0
2011	337	22.3	15.1
2012	354	22.7	15.6
2013	391	23.1	16.9
2014	378	23.5	16.1
2015	435	23.8	18.3
2016	503	24.1	20.8
2017	510	24.6	20.7
2018	554	24.9	22.2
2019	548	25.3	21.6

ORGAN TRANSPLANT RECIPIENTS

As implementation of the Reform Package was slow and ineffective, 6,637 people missed out on receiving a transplant between 2009 and 2019.

Year	Actual Number of Transplant Recipients	Targeted Number of Transplants	Number missed out on receiving a transplant (from 2009, cumulative)
2009	799	908	109
2010	931	1,155	333
2011	1,001	1,403	734
2012	1,052	1,650	1,332
2013	1,122	1,668	1,878
2014	1,117	1,885	2,646
2015	1,241	2,157	3,562
2016	1,448	2,169	4,283
2017	1,402	2,214	5,095
2018	1,544	2,253	5,804
2019	1,444	2,277	6,637

One organ donor may be able to save the lives of many recipients as multiple organs can be donated to several people.

Targeted Number of Transplants over the years are obtained from the “Reform Package” Budget presented to Cabinet in 2008.

2013 to 2019 are based on 90 transplant recipients per million population.

QUARTERLY SCORECARD

Since the formation of the Organ and Tissue Authority in January 2009, ShareLife Australia has used national organ registry data from ANZOD to produce a quarterly scorecard that tracks Australia’s performance in the global context. Just prior to the formation, for the 12 months ended December 2008, Australia procured 39.0 Transplant recipients per million population (pmp). Despite more than $45,000,000.00 annual support by the Federal Government, the number of Transplant recipients for the 12 months ended December 2021 has only increased to 45.6 pmp and a decline from the peak of 61.6 pmp in December 2018. To be a “world leader” we need to be doing nearly 90 Transplant recipients pmp.

Follow the links below to view each of the scorecard reports (PDF).

SCORECARDS 2021

STATE PERFORMANCE

The distribution of population by State in Australia varies widely. The chart below shows that the number of donors per million population are not consistent across States and Territories. Vic has consistently performed above the national rate over the last few years while NSW has continued to perform below the national rate. Qld has moved from below to above the national rate in the previous 2 years but last year declined substantially. The smaller States and Territories also tend to experience larger variations in donors per million population measures year on year.

In 2018, were it not for the substantial increase in Vic, there would have been no increase in the national rate.

click for larger image

Victoria now dominates the number of deceased donors. Given the size of population in NSW, VIC and QLD, improvements in these States from a donors per million population perspective will have a substantial impact on the number of donors in Australia.

click for larger image

HOSPITAL PERFORMANCE

On 11/07/2018 ANZOD published the “Australian Data Tables” as part of its 2018 Annual Report. The following analysis is derived from the Tables.

In 2017, 87 Donor hospitals in Australia procured 510 donors. The chart below shows the first 32 hospitals ranked by number of organ donors. Note the remaining 55 hospitals (not shown) had four or less donors.When ranking hospitals by the number of organ donors in 2017:

The leading hospital had 38 donors
18 out of 87 hospitals (20%) had 10 or more donors (304, amounting to 60% of total donors)
14 out of 87 hospitals (16%) had between 5 and 9 donors (91 amounting to 18% of total donors)
55 out of 87 hospitals (64%) had 4 or less donors (115 amounting to 22% of total donors)

click for larger image

Comparing the annual average of the 7 years prior to that of the 9 years post establishment of OTA, of the top 31 hospitals in 2017, only 11 hospitals increased by more than 5 donors per annum with the size of the increase declining rapidly after these.