Record number of organs donated last year

Creating an organ donation app is one of the ways Swisstransplant worked to increase donors Keystone

Swisstransplant, Switzerland’s organ donation organisation, registered a record number of life-saving organ donations made last year in its annual report.

In total, organs from 143 deceased people were able to be distributed to 550 patients in 2015, the most donations ever recorded by Swisstransplant. Twenty-six more donors gave their organs than the previous year.

Specifically, the number of people whose organs were donated before their cardiovascular system went into complete arrest increased from 99 to 127 in 2015. According to Swisstransplant director Franz Immer, such an increase among that group is almost unheard of in Europe. Organs from such individuals are unique because they are supplied with blood until the point of transplantation.

Other donor groups include those who are brain-dead and whose organs were deprived of blood before transplantation as well as living donors who give a kidney or part of a liver, for example.

Nearly two-thirds of the organs donated in 2015 were a kidney or a liver. The rest were heart, lung or pancreas donations.

Also, fewer new people were added to the transplant list than in previous years. At the end of 2015, 1,384 people were waiting for a transplant.

Since 2013, Swisstransplant has been working towards a goal of receiving 20 brain-dead donors per million inhabitants in Switzerland. Last year, they received 17.4 donors per million inhabitants.

The organisation attributes the increase in donations to the fact that organ donation is talked about more frequently in hospitals and clinics and has become less of a taboo overall in Switzerland.