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THOUSANDS of people who would benefit from a kidney transplant are being denied the chance even to be considered for a donor organ because hospitals are failing to put them on the waiting list, keeping the number of would-be recipients artificially low, say Sydney doctors.
The proportion of younger dialysis patients who join the kidney waiting list has plummeted Australia-wide from 33 per cent to 22 per cent in just five years, according to analysis of transplant and kidney disease statistics, while across all age groups only 11 per cent of more than 10,000 people on dialysis are in the queue.
Bruce Pussell, a Prince of Wales Hospital kidney specialist who led the research, said failure to put patients on the waiting list was unethical because even elderly people lived longer when they received a transplant.
The figures are in contrast with Britain and France, where almost half of those aged 65 or younger were given a chance of receiving an organ from a deceased donor.
Professor Pussell, whose study is published today in the Internal Medicine Journal, acknowledged a shortage of donor organs meant some people would wait years or might never receive a kidney.
But, he said, ''we should not 'solve' this [shortage] by restricting referral or by processes of allocation that are fundamentally at odds with widely shared moral values''.
National eligibility rules agreed to last year make age and other forms of discrimination unacceptable but say patients should only be considered for a kidney transplant if they have at least an 80 per cent chance of living five years.
Professor Pussell said doctors instead needed guidance on what medical conditions should preclude a kidney graft, and called for the National Health & Medical Research Council to review transplant eligibility.
A spokesman for the federal parliamentary secretary for health and ageing, Catherine King, said the issue should be addressed by doctors' groups.
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