Living Donor Program

Across the United States, more than 100,000 people await a kidney to become available, and nearly 20,000 of them are in California. Patients in need of a kidney transplant wait an average of six to 10 years for a kidney to become available.

That is because most transplanted kidneys come from people whose organs were donated upon death. However, a live donor kidney offers significant advantages:

• They have a lower risk of rejection.
• They function better and longer than kidneys from deceased donors.

Living donors have become more common in recent years as family members or friends who are a tissue match donate organs to loved ones. More rare are donors with no connection to someone in need of a transplant but who choose to donate to a stranger. These non-directed donors, as they are called, can spark a chain that gives the gift of life to many more people.

UCI Health has a program to encourage living kidney donations. Our kidney transplant program enables direct donations — when a donor and recipient are a close match — and paired exchanges that link two or more pairs of people to get viable kidney donor exchanges. About one-third of kidneys transplanted in the last year at UCI Medical Center have come from living donors.

If you are interested in becoming a living donor, please complete our health history questionnaire ›

We recommend accessing the questionnaire on a laptop or desktop computer to allow you to better concentrate on the questions about your health. To proceed, you will need to provide your accurate weight and height.

Once you have submitted a completed questionnaire, it will be reviewed by a living donor coordinator. If you are a possible candidate, you will be contacted. If you have questions at any time, you may contact a living donor team member at livingdonor@uci.edu

Thank you in advance for your generous offer to be a kidney donor.

For more information, please contact us at 714-456-8441 or livingdonor@uci.edu