ABSTRACT
Nowadays, as many of the problems confronting kidney transplantation have been solved, the number of operations has increased dramatically. So, resource utilization and financial issues have been cited as a new problem for transplantation centres. This study was done to find and assess the factors which can reduce the hospitalization period, while this factor claims the biggest share of the total cost of the treatment process. In this retrospective study, done in kidney transplantation word of Imam Reza Hospital, the medical history of 170 kidney transplantation recipients and donors, whose operations were performed between 2000 and 2002, were studied. Collected information of recipient's characteristics included gender, age, reason for kidney failure, weight, height, blood group, dialysis period, transplantation history, immunosuppressant regimes, complications after operation, and hospitalization after the first discharge due to transplantation operation complications; and for the donors, age, sex and blood group of the donor and the type of donor [cadaver or living] and the relationship between the recipients and the donors were gathered in a questionnaire and analyzed by descriptive statistics and T - test. Among all pre-transplant variables only length of dialysis before transplantation and the relationship between donors and recipients were found to be independently significant in predicting the increased hospitalization period and consequently charges. It is shown that by reducing the waiting time and performing more operations on relative donors and recipients, we can significantly decrease hospitalization period and as a result the cost of treatment