Background: The Live Donor Champion (LDC) program is a clinical program offered to kidney waitlist candidates at our high volume transplant center. The six-month program serves as educational and advocacy training for transplant candidates and friends and family members chosen to serve as advocates, or “Live Donor Champions”, on the candidate's behalf. The goal of the program is to train candidates and their LDC to increase awareness of live donation and to identify potential live donors.

Methods: We studied 104 adult kidney transplant candidates that have participated in the LDC program at Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center between October 2013 and May 2015. We compared donor referrals for candidates that participated in the program with matched controls from our waiting list. We matched on age at listing, listing date, sex, race, and ABO blood type. We quantified the association between program participation and having at least one donor referral using logistic regression. We quantified the association between program participation and the number of donor referrals using Poisson regression. In a subset of participants (n=44) we quantified changes in knowledge of and comfort discussing live donation throughout participation in the program.

Results: Among LDC participants, there were a total of 138 donor referrals, while matched controls had 82 donor referrals (p=0.002). LDC participation was associated with 2.6-fold higher odds of having at least one donor referral (95% CI 1.5-4.7, p<0.001). LDC participation was also associated with a 1.9-fold higher incidence of donor referrals (95% CI 1.2-3.1, p=0.009). There was a statistically significant increase in knowledge of live donation and comfort discussing live donation among candidates participating alone, candidates participating with an LDC, and LDCs (all p values <0.001).

Conclusions: Participation in the LDC program resulted in an increase in donor referrals, which was likely a result on increased knowledge of and comfort discussing live donation among both candidates and live donor champions.

CITATION INFORMATION: King E, Bowring M, Kumar K, Garonzik Wang J, Segev D. The Live Donor Champion Program: A Novel Approach to Identying Live Kideny Donors. Am J Transplant. 2016;16 (suppl 3).

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