Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department has taken to help reduce waiting lists for a kidney transplant.

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) manage the NHS Organ Donor Register and National Transplant Register in the United Kingdom. They are working to reduce the number of patients on the waiting list by revising the National Organ Retrieval Service to improve its efficiency, supporting clinical teams to increase the use of extended criteria donors, implementing new technology to improve non-use rates, and growing the UK Living Kidney Sharing Scheme to enable more centres to share kidneys across the country.

The Department, NHSBT, and NHS England are working together to improve utilisation of all solid organs following recommendations from the Organ Utilisation Group 2023 report. This includes considering how Assessment and Recovery Centres could be established and where deceased donor kidneys are perfused and assessed, with the potential to increase kidneys for transplantation by up to 400 per year.