2,470 Black transplant patients get new kidney after medical redress
Newsy
All 230 U.S. hospitals that do kidney transplants had until Jan. 4 to go back and recalculate waiting times for Black patients.
Two hundred and thirty hospitals found 14,701 kidney transplant patients were eligible for a transplant sooner than previously determined based on flawed math calculating kidney function.
The average kidney transplant patient waits three to five years for an organ. For Craig Merritt, in late November 2023, he had lived with kidney disease for more than 20 years, was on dialysis, and had been waiting for around four years for a transplant.
"Some days I didn't think I was going to ever get called," he said. "However, I had some other friends in different states who were dealing with the same thing I was dealing with. They were on the list, and they got called. That's where my hope came from, that one day I would receive a kidney transplant."
Merritt received a call on a Friday night just before Thanksgiving from the transplant center in Charleston, where he was on a waiting list for a new kidney. He was told instead of four years, he had gotten credit for eight years of waiting.
His phone call is a result of a policy change about something called the estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR. Doctors use the calculation to determine kidney function.
