Organ and tissue donors gave almost 300 lifesaving gifts in 2025
60 people, with the support of their whānau, donated organs following their death in 2025, made up of 45 donations after brain death and 15 after circulatory death.
This enabled 190 organs to reach people waiting for lifesaving transplants, offering far reaching benefits not just to recipients but to their families and wider communities.
A further 57 people became tissue only donors, giving tissues such as cornea, sclera and heart valves that go on to improve many more lives again. A cornea can restore sight to someone who has lost it, while heart valves are often used to help babies and young people born with heart conditions.
Organ donation is only possible in a small proportion of all deaths nationally, which is part of why each case carries so much weight. A single donor has the potential to help up to ten people through the combination of organ and tissue donation, a ripple effect that reaches far beyond the immediate family involved.
The need remains significant and constant. In any year around 500 New Zealanders are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant alone, the most in demand organ in the country, and many of them spend years attached to a dialysis machine for hours at a stretch, several days a week, while they wait.
Kidney transplants are carried out at centres in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, so Canterbury patients waiting for a kidney can have their transplant at Christchurch Hospital. Heart, lung and liver transplants are done at Auckland City Hospital.
Deceased donor numbers nationally have generally sat in the range of 60 to 70 a year in recent times, a level that has held relatively steady over the past decade rather than climbing to meet demand.
Organ Donation New Zealand’s work last year went well beyond the clinical activity behind those numbers. Teams built new systems, delivered education across the health sector and engaged with counterparts in Australia and the United Kingdom to inform strategic planning for lifting New Zealand’s donation rates in the years ahead.
That international engagement reflects a shared challenge, with countries across the world grappling with the same gap between how many people need a transplant and how many donors come forward each year.
Increasing donation rates remains a long-term goal for the sector, and public awareness plays its part alongside clinical improvements in identifying and supporting potential donors and their families through what is often the hardest decision they will ever face.
For many families, that decision is made in the middle of sudden grief, which is why having already talked about donation wishes, and recorded them, can make such a difficult moment a little easier to navigate when it eventually arrives.
