Receive (or Give) a Living Kidney Donation

Kidney transplantation used to mean waiting, often for years, for a compatible, deceased-donor kidney. But today, many living donors—people willing to give one of their healthy kidneys to help someone else—are stepping into the gap. According to the National Kidney Foundation, in 2014 about 30 percent of all kidney transplants came from living donors.

If you receive a living kidney donation, benefits include a better outcome than with a deceased-donor transplant, a much shorter waiting time (typically three to six months), less dialysis time and the ability to schedule the operation to meet your and the donor’s needs.

If you’re considering becoming a kidney donor, rest assured that your health will not suffer, as the risk of complications to you is less than 1 percent. Giving up a kidney does not change your life expectancy, and in fact you may feel great satisfaction knowing that you helped save the life of a close relative, friend or even a stranger.

To find out if you're eligible to donate a kidney, please complete this online form.

There are two types of living donors:

• Related — A healthy blood relative of the person awaiting transplant. This includes a sibling, parent, child, aunt, uncle, cousin, etc.
• Unrelated — A healthy person who is not blood-related to the person awaiting transplant. This can include someone emotionally close, such as a spouse, in-law or close friend, or an altruistic donor—someone who gives a kidney to help any compatible recipient in need.

Kidney Paired Donation Program

If you want to donate a kidney but your organ is not compatible with your intended recipient, you can become part of the Sutter Health’s California Pacific Medical Center's Kidney Paired Donation Program. A sophisticated computer program (created by a former Sutter Health kidney transplant patient) takes the genetic characteristics of people who need kidneys and people willing to donate a healthy kidney and generates a series of compatible matches or “swaps.” This enables you to donate to another recipient while ensuring that your loved one simultaneously receives a life-giving, living-donor kidney.

Sutter Health’s California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC), the largest kidney-paired donation program on the West Coast, performed its first kidney paired donor transplant in 2003 and made history in 2011 as the first California transplant program to perform five paired donor transplants in one day. In 2015, an altruistic donor triggered a rare six-way paired kidney donation at CPMC that matched six donors and six recipients in 12 surgeries over two days.

Kidney disease afflicts one in nine people in this country—that’s nearly 100,000 people in San Francisco alone, where the average wait for a kidney transplant is four to six years. Creative approaches like multi-kidney swap are part of Sutter’s commitment to help more people achieve a long, dialysis-free life.