• Amina Silva, Jehan Lalani, Lee James, Shauna O'Donnell, Alexandre Amar-Zifkin, Sam D Shemie, and Samara Zavalkoff.
• Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, Ottawa, ON, Canada. asilva@cheo.on.ca.
• Can J Anaesth. 2024 Jan 1; 71 (1): 143151143-151.

PurposeWe sought to collate and summarize existing literature on donor audits (DA) and how they have been used to guide deceased organ donation and transplantation system performance and quality assurance.SourceWe searched MEDLINE, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and Web of Science supplemented by Google to identify grey literature on 6 May 2022, to locate studies in English, French, and Spanish. The data were screened, extracted, and analyzed independently by two reviewers. We grouped the results into five categories: 1) motivation for DA, 2) DA methodology, 3) potential and actual donors, 4) missed donation opportunities, and 5) quality improvement.Principal FindingsThe search yielded 2,416 unique publications and 52 were included in this review. Most studies were from the UK (n = 13) and published between 2001 and 2006 (n = 15). The methodologies described for DA were diverse. Our findings showed that the primary motivation for conducting DA was to identify potential donors and the number of potential deceased organ donors is significantly higher than the number of actual donors. Among retrieved studies, the proportion of donation opportunities following neurologic determination of death was 95/222 (43%) compared with 25/181 (14%) for donation after cardiocirculatory death (DCD), suggesting that the missed donation rate is higher for DCD.ConclusionDonor audits help identify missed donation opportunities along the deceased donation pathway and can help support the evaluation of quality improvement initiatives.© 2023. The Author(s).

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