In looking at deceased donation, we need to realize that this is an incredibly rare opportunity. The conditions under which someone can become a deceased donor are the result of probably only 1% of the deaths that happen per year in Canada. About 270,000 Canadians die per year and to be considered a potential deceased donor, you have to die in a hospital, in an ICU unit, while on a ventilator, and without any chronic complications that would prevent you from being a donor. We realize that it is an incredibly rare opportunity and that's why missing any potential donor, to us, is a public health concern or something that should never happen in a hospital, although we know it happens all the time. For example, Lori mentioned that we had just under 800 deceased donors in total in Canada last year and we think we are potentially missing thousands of donors every year that do not get identified.
Part of the problem is that there are no repercussions for the hospital if it misses a donor. There are no repercussions for the unit if it fails to identify a donor. In our work with Canadian Blood Services, we've been looking at the potential mechanisms we can put in place and trying to understand the system changes we can make to better identify these donors. If we could go from 800 donors to 2,000 donors a year, that would have a transformative impact on our ability to transplant patients.
Working together with Canadian Blood Services, we are able to look at different ways of understanding where the critical barriers are in identifying donors and how to never waste a potential opportunity. Let's start using all of the organs that are offered and presented. Dr. West was talking about these organ-in-a-box devices that allow us to actually take an organ that would have normally been thrown in the garbage and put it on the machine to repair it, do surgery on it, and manipulate it, in order to use it to save lives. We're looking for every opportunity to increase donation and we want to look at the system to see where there are challenges so that we can start identifying more donors.