Interprovincial organ sharing programs

Canadian Blood Services works with the Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation (OTDT) community to improve national system performance. We do this through the development of leading practices, professional education, public awareness and data analysis and reporting. We also manage clinical programs that support interprovincial sharing of organs.

• The Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) program looks for compatible transplants created through chains of paired donation from otherwise incompatible pairs.
• The Highly Sensitized Patient (HSP) program improves chances of a kidney transplant for hard to match patients.
• The National Organ Waitlist (NOW) is a real-time data source for non-renal patients throughout Canada. 
• The Interprovincial Organ Sharing of Hearts for High-Status Recipients project (referred to as the “IPOS Heart project”) is guided by the need to improve the allocation of a very rare and precious gift. The project’s focus is to match available hearts to the most medically urgent, and difficult to match heart waitlist patients.

These programs are facilitated through the Canadian Transplant Registry, a national web-based computer program that provides real-time access for both transactional data and data for analytics and reporting.