Much goes into the work of kidney transplantation to make it successful.

Major factors are a dialysis patient, or pre-dialysis patient who is otherwise in good health, receiving a healthy, preferably well matched kidney with minimal cold ischaemia time.

Post-kidney transplant there is weekly surveillance for the first three months which then tapers to surveillance about every two months.

In this time, patients get used to immunosuppression, generally triple therapy (such as Prednisone, Mycophenolate, Tacrolimus), and also navigate a period when they are susceptible to infection, are on prophylactic anti-microbials to viral infection and opportunistic infection, and making sure there is no rejection of the transplant.

For cadaveric transplantation, the kidney lasts about eight years on average.

With live related kidney donation, the chances of keeping the kidney for a longer period of time is significantly enhanced.

Nonetheless not all kidneys do well, and about 10% of patients who have received a kidney transplant return to the cadaveric kidney donation pool as candidates for a second kidney transplant.

The success of the Practice in transplantation over many years can be accessed on this website.  You may compare with the Australian results through ANZDATA (www.anzdata.org.au and go to reports).