Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Living donor kidney transplantation entails a healthy living donor donating one of their kidneys to a patient with kidney failure. There are sex disparities in living kidney donation and over 60% of living donors globally are female. This is believed to be driven by gender-related factors, such as the man being the main source of income in a family and the woman being more caring. However, all of this is speculative and anecdotal. A comprehensive gender approach to explain this has not been undertaken. Also, our prior work raises concerns that there are gender differences in the experiences of men and women living kidney donors and their care needs prior to, during, and after donation. We now want to plan for a comprehensive gender analysis study in living kidney donation and request support for two activities to help plan the research project. First, we want to set up a patient partnership committee that will advise us on our approach and methods and help develop a tool called a gender analysis matrix. This tool will help us capture data in our future work. Second, we want to characterize the race and ethnicity of prior living kidney donors in Canada to see if we can pursue an intersectional analysis in Canada. The output of both these activities will help us develop a research project to identify the root causes of sex and gender disparities in living kidney donation.