Assessing Countries’ Deceased Organ Donation and Transplantation Performance

@#Introduction: Donors per million population and transplantations per million population are standardized, widely used indicators to assess and compare countries’ performance in organ donation and transplantation. This study aims to investigate these two particular metrics of organ donation and transplantation performance, and to introduce a new index, namely, ‘transplantations per patients on the waiting list’. Methods: Secondary analyses of data on 23 countries in 2016 were used to construct the transplantations per patients on the waiting list indicator for kidney, liver, pancreas, heart, and lung transplantation, as well as for the transplantation of any of the five aforementioned organs. Results: According to the transplantations per patients on the waiting list, the best-performing countries in terms of organ donation and transplantation are Belarus for kidney transplantation, Finland for liver and pancreas transplantation, Australia for heart transplantation, and France for lung transplantation. Considering all five organs together, Sweden, Australia, Finland, Austria, and Poland were the top five best-performing countries, followed by Spain in the sixth position. Conclusion: The deceased transplantations per patients on the waiting list can be an alternative indicator to assess performance, along with the widely-used donors and transplantations per million population, but still has its limitations in certain scenarios.

Gender, citizenship and health-related quality of life: An overall perspective from Malaysia

Objectives: Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is an essential dimension of overall human quality of life, in which disparities have been hypothesised between women and men, as well as between citizens and non-citizens of a country in past literatures. This study is to evaluate and compare the HRQoL of citizens and non-citizens living in greater Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru, as well as comparing HRQoL between genders. Materials and Methods: The SF-8 questionnaire was used to collect information from 1,708 respondents (1,032 Malaysian citizens and 676 non-citizens), via face-to-face interview between October and December 2015. Results: Overall, respondents reported moderate HRQoL. Non-citizens reported better HRQoL than the Malaysian citizens, while men reported better HRQoL compared to women (for both citizens and non-citizens). Conclusions: The HRQoL of both citizens and noncitizens’ in Malaysia could be improved. Measures should be taken to remove the disparity in HRQoL between men and women, aiming to achieve equal health status for both genders.