To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much NHS England spent on machine perfusion used in organ transplantation in each of the last five years.
Answered on
31 March 2022
NHS Blood and Transplant is the organisation responsible for matching, allocating and retrieving organs for transplant in the United Kingdom. Machine perfusion is a technique used to preserve organs, enabling more organs to be successfully transplanted.
In 2019, NHS England and NHS Improvement and NHS Blood and Transplant invested in a three-year innovation fund of £5 million to support the use of machine perfusion for heart donation after circulatory death (DCD). The following table shows funding for machine perfusion for DCD in each year since from 2017/2018 to 2020/2021. Data for 2021/22 is not yet available.
Financial year | Total | Funding from NHS England and NHS Improvement | Funding from NHS Blood and Transplant |
2017/2018 | £0 | £0 | £0 |
2018/2019 | £0 | £0 | £0 |
2019/2020 | £782,066 | £391,033 | £391,033 |
2020/2021 | £1,303,176 | £651,588 | £651,588 |
Source: NHS Blood and Transplant
Note:
Funding for DCD covers payments for staffing and consumables. Transportation costs associated with these retrievals have not been included but are estimated to be £450,000 per annum.
The following table shows NHS Blood and Transplant expenditure on machine perfusion for liver DCD in each year from 2017/18. Information for 2021/22 is not yet available.
Financial year | Total |
2017/2018 | £0 |
2018/2019 | £162,437 |
2019/2020 | £225,286 |
2020/2021 | £239,136 |
Source: NHS Blood and Transplant.