The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has issued a costing template to accompany its guidance on organ donation for transplantation.

The costing report states that implementing the recommendations in the guideline is expected to lead to an increase in the number of organ donors and a corresponding increase in the number of transplantation procedures carried out.

Increasing the number of donors over current baseline numbers by 10% in year one, 20% in year two and 25% from year three onwards results in a cost impact in year 1 of £2.5 million. Since maintenance costs and savings from reduced renal dialysis are recurrent, the cumulative effect from previous cohorts of patients leads to a cost impact of £3.0 million in year two, a cost of £0.4 million in year three, a saving of £4.5 million in year four followed by increasing cumulative savings up to steady state cumulative savings of around £18.2 million.