The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the primary Federal agency responsible for organ donation and transplantation.

Our Coalition’s HRSA campaign is the first step in a long-term collaboration with HRSA to implement policies to support and increase living kidney donation.

While HRSA has supported many important projects in living donation, they have been unwilling to support any project to increase living donation. In fact, in recent years any project concerning living donation had been excluded from funding altogether.

The Coalition found this development to be unacceptable. Since the beginning of 2015, we have conducted a campaign to persuade HRSA to support the goal of increasing living donation.

This campaign has already begun to bear fruit. At the Coalition’s request, in September, 2016 HRSA hosted a stakeholder meeting. The meeting was an important step towards future governmental supports needed to increase awareness for the kidney crisis, the need for more living donors, and the development of new reporting critical for further increases in donor safety and support.

Progress

Soon after the meeting, HRSA released a set of grant proposals to fund projects including education living donation for 3 million dollars a year for three years.

Nevertheless, more work remains to be done, since these grants still exclude projects to promote living kidney donation. Moreover, we also are determined to persuade HRSA to include living donation goals on its 2016 Annual Performance Report and to sponsor a Living Donation Breakthrough Collaborative beginning in 2017.
(See HRSA Coalition Statement of Principles)