Organ donation pledges surge, ministry aims higher

PETALING JAYA: On average, 700 Malaysians a day have pledged to be organ donors since the MySejahtera app introduced its organ donation feature on Sept 6, says the Health Ministry.

It said there had been more than 4,500 new pledges as of 3pm yesterday, attributing this figure to the easier pledging process.

The ministry said it aimed to raise this number further.

“With the introduction of the new feature in MySejahtera, we were targeting 1,000 pledges per day.

“Our aim is to get more than 1% of the Malaysian population to be organ donor pledgers.

“Presently, the number of organ donor pledgers is promising, but we hope that more Malaysians become pledgers and this number continues to rise,” it said.

Last week, Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin announced that MySejahtera would include an organ donation feature to make it possible for Malaysians to pledge as donors through the app.

He said that according to the National Transplant Resource Centre, there have been 517,758 registered organ donors since 1997.

But as of July this year, only 779 were actual donors and 10,442 people were now waiting for organ transplants.

Khairy said Malaysia ranked 10th in the world for a low transplantation rate, with only 2.84 transplantations per 1,000 of the population in 2021.