Ontario, B.C. residents wait longer for kidney transplants than any other Canadians

The Star | Julian Sher

If you need a life-saving kidney, the worst place in Canada to be is Ontario and British Columbia where you can wait four to six years for a transplant — more than double the time than a patient living in Nova Scotia or Quebec.

That’s because Canadians have to play a sort of postal code lottery, lingering on unequal waiting lists managed by each province. Canada — unlike the United States and most European countries — has no centralized, national list for people desperate for a new organ, in effect putting geography ahead of need.

And that long wait can be deadly.

In the first half of 2011, 20 of the 36 Canadians who died while waiting for a transplanted kidney were from Ontario — more than all the other provinces combined. In 2010, another 80 Canadians passed away, 34 of them from Ontario.

Read more: http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1119432--ontario-b-c-residents-wait-longer-for-kidney-transplants-than-any-other-canadians?bn=1