tag | organ donation

Mandi Smith, Annville resident and kidney donor, and her transplant surgeon at UPMC, Dr. Vijay Menon, joined us on The Spark Tuesday to share her story and the importance of organ donation.

Health officials are changing how they assess the regional nonprofits that find organs to transplant. The goal is to understand, and eventually fix, the geographic disparities in organ availability.

The Associated Press took a close look at that system and calculated that some of those agencies are securing deceased donors at half the rate of others — even as 113,000 people linger on the nation’s transplant waiting list, and about 20 die each day.