Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to make access to liver transplantation services more equitable.

Livers are retrieved and allocated on a zonal basis and the decision whether or not to list a patient for transplantation is taken by a multi-disciplinary team at the transplant centre, of which there are seven in the United Kingdom.Patients meeting the agreed clinical criteria, and with their consent, will be added to the National Transplant List. All centres must follow a common listing policy to ensure equity of access and that organs are allocated in the most clinically effective way, resulting in 842 liver transplants between 1 April 2014 - 31 March 2015.

NHS Blood and Transplant, the organ donation organisation for the UK, launched their strategy in July 2013 – Taking Organ Transplantation to 2020, that sets the agenda for increasing organ donation and transplantation rates by increasing consent rates. Encouragingly organ donation rates have increased by around 60% and transplant rates by some 47% since 2008 mainly through a strengthening of the donation infrastructure including increased specialist nurses and improved retrieval arrangements.