Seoul to permit organ donations after patient's heart stops, amid shortage

South Korea's Health Ministry on Oct 16 announced its first-ever national plan to allow organ donations after a patient's heart stops, a reform aimed at addressing the country's widening imbalance between organ transplant demand and donation rates.

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Nearly 55,000 people are on waiting lists for organ transplants in South Korea, where the average wait stretches to four years. Some patients wait up to eight years for a kidney, while 8.5 people die each day on average before receiving a needed organ.

Currently, South Korea's organ donation system depends almost entirely on brain-dead donors. However, the number of such donors has steadily declined from 478 in 2020 to 397 in 2024 - while the number of patients waiting for transplants has increased sharply, from 43,182 to 54,789, during the same period.

Despite rising demand, only 3.6 per cent of the population has registered as organ donors, and the number of brain-dead donors declined by 18 per cent in 2024.

The comprehensive plan for organ and tissue donation and transplantation from 2026 to 2030 — the country's first-ever national framework on organ and tissue donation — outlines a series of measures to expand organ donations and ease the nation's severe transplant shortage.