KUALA LUMPUR: The MySejahtera application will incorporate an organ donor pledge registration feature in the next few days.
Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said apart from raising awareness and support for the organ donation initiative, the feature would make it easy for people to sign up as donors.
"The pledge will be electronically stored in the Health Ministry's system. This will be showed to the next-of-kin of a deceased person as proof that he or she wanted to give the gift of life to someone else," he said when closing the national level Organ Donation Awareness Week at PPR Seri Alam 2 here today.
Khairy said that to date, there are 10,442 people waiting for organ transplants.
Malaysia, he added, was among the 10 countries with the lowest transplant rate in the world last year, based on data by the Global Observatory On Donation and Transplantation.
"There were 2.84 organ transplants done per one million population last year compared with 5.64 in 2020.
"The National Transplant Resource Centre statistics up to July this year showed there were 779 organ donors after death since 1997.
"The number of organ donor pledges now stand at 517,758 people since 1997."
Khairy said as a result of the very low donor rate, the government was forced to spent a lot of money on haemodialysis for end-stage kidney failure patients.
"Overseas, these patients would go for transplants. In Malaysia, the organ donor rate is very low, so there aren't many options."