People should be allowed to sell their kidneys for £28,000 to tackle a shortage of donors, a researcher has suggested.
Sue Rabbitt Roff, a senior research fellow at the University of Dundee, said it was time to pilot “paid provision” of live kidneys in the UK, under “strict rules of access and equity”.
She said letting people sell theirs could help them pay off university loans or simply give them the chance to do a kind deed. The rate of donation of kidneys from the dead and living had not kept pace with the need for the organs and has plateaued at about 2,000 a year in the UK.
In a Personal View article published on the British Medical Journal website, she suggested a move towards regulated paid provision for live donors’ kidneys, with the organs allocated in the same “fair” way as they are now.
Full story: Kidney sale proposal sparks medical ethics debate