The gift that saved Craig’s life once – and why it hasn’t come again

Sunday, 26 October 2025

It has been 13 years on the wait list for a new kidney for Craig Leckner. The father of two knows he is on borrowed time - kidney failure has taken all feeling in his feet, and he is losing sensation in his hands. Senior reporter Nicholas Jones details his fight for survival, and what’s holding back organ donation rates.

Craig Leckner was 23 and on a building site in Northland when he cut his arm.

The infection worsened, and for months afterwards he felt increasingly exhausted. Doctors ordered tests and biopsies.

“They got me into the office and said, ‘Your kidneys are down to about 15%, and they're going to fail.”

Healthy kidneys filter around a half cup of blood each minute, taking out wastes and extra fluid to make urine.

Craig soon began dialysis to replace some of this function. Three times a week he sat by a machine for five hours, as it cleaned his blood and returned it to his body.

Dialysis can’t replicate everything the kidneys do, and people on it have limited life expectancy. Leckner needed a kidney transplant to survive.

His sister stepped forward, and the surgery happened in 2005. That gave him eight years of much improved health, but the donated kidney then began to fail, and he was soon back on dialysis.

Craig has been on the wait list for a new kidney for 13 years. He is one of about 500 to 600 people waiting for an organ at any one time, the vast majority of whom need a kidney.

New Zealand’s deceased donor rate is stalled below comparable countries including Australia. Unmet need is difficult to measure, but around a third of people put on the waiting list for a kidney won’t receive one.

Documents and emails obtained by Stuff reveal experts have repeatedly lobbied for straightforward and cost-effective steps to significantly boost donations, and have warned a chunk of what little money should be available has been “lost” in the system.

Health Minister Simeon Brown has received initial advice from officials on increasing organ donations, and says he is seeking more detailed information, “including on the development of a strategic plan”.

Time is running out for Craig, who has a 15-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son.

“I’ve got no feeling in my feet - I stood on a fish hook the other day and had no idea. I’m losing feeling in my hands, I get tired easily - things like mowing the lawns, I just can’t do,” the 48-year-old says.

“The kids see me on this [dialysis] machine, and it's not pretty. I try to do as much as I can with them, but I get frustrated that I can't do the things that other dads do.

“It does put you in touch with your mortality. I've done what I can to make sure that my wife and kids will be okay without me, and that’s the most important thing.”

How the waitlist is decided

Organ donation can be either from a living donor (restricted to kidneys or part of a liver) or deceased donor. The latter is possible only when a person is on a ventilator in one of 24 intensive care units across the country, usually with a devastating brain injury.

In 2024 there were 37,722 deaths in New Zealand. Of these, 1.6% were in a situation where donation may be considered.

“There's not enough organs to go around, so we do limit access to the list, dependent on what we perceive someone’s survival might be at five years,” says Dr Ian Dittmer, a renal transplant physician at Auckland CIty Hospital and medical director of the kidney allocation scheme.

That’s done with the help of an algorithm that takes into account factors like age, conditions like diabetes or cardiovascular disease, and BMI - “it’s actually good to be slightly overweight if you’re having a transplant, it means you have more to go back on,” says Dittmer.

People can avoid that process if they find a suitable living donor, who is usually someone known to them.

When Craig’s kidneys failed his parents and three sisters offered to donate. His older sister Janelle Graham was the first to be approved.

“For me it was a privilege - I was over the moon that I was able to do it,” she says. “Seeing what he was going through, we all just wanted that to be over.”

Her kidney was removed by keyhole surgery and she was back at work in a couple of weeks. The recovery was tougher for Craig - it was a few weeks before he could walk as far as the bathroom, and the permanent cocktail of heavy-duty immunosuppressant drugs needed to stop his body attacking the foreign organ “messed with my head a bit”.

“I was tremendously grateful for a second chance, and I’d get really emotional and disappointed about things like seeing young people smoking.”

Kidney failure had dimmed his taste, vision and hearing, which came back after the surgery.

“All of a sudden, food was just incredible again.”

Other sensations returned. Craig hadn’t urinated since going on dialysis about 12 months earlier, because that process removes excess fluid from the blood.

“The first time you take a piss is pretty sore, but it's really, really amazing.”

Craig’s health deteriorated rapidly when his donated kidney began to fail. Denied ACC cover, he had moved into sales, but knew that job would soon become impossible.

He and wife Nadine reduced their financial burden by swapping a West Auckland mortgage for one in Napier. They moved in November 2011, a week before his daughter Mackenzie’s 2nd birthday.

He was soon back on dialysis. The only work he can manage is as an Uber driver. The family is fortunate that Nadine earns decent money managing a kindergarten.

His other sisters and wider family were ruled out as donors.

“I would have hoped that he would have got more than that amount of time out of [my kidney],” Janelle says.

“But Craig’s journey was almost the same timeframe as Jonah Lomu’s [who received a kidney in 2004, and died aged 40 in 2015 while on the waiting list for another transplant]. Craig is still here. But we know of other people who have had their kidneys for 30 years.”

More than 20 people - family, friends and acquaintances - have offered Craig another kidney, however all have eventually been deemed unsuitable.

Craig hasn’t had a detailed reason why, but believes in some cases his antibodies are to blame. These can be created in response to past blood transfusions, transplants or illnesses, and would attack a new organ.

He is floored by the generosity of those who have offered him help.

“A friend of my wife came to me and said, ‘I want to get tested, I want to give you a kidney’. I knew her, but I didn’t know her that well. What do you say to someone that's going to do that, who is willing to risk their life. It’s a huge thing.

“My sister gave me the kidney, and she gets better birthday presents than everybody else. But what do you say? There’s nothing you can do or say to adequately thank someone.”

Funding to improve donations was ‘lost’

The Ministry of Health in 2017 launched a strategy to increase organ donations, but it hasn’t been fully implemented and the rate of deceased donors has plateaued at around 12 per 1 million population, compared to over 19 in Australia and placing us in the middle of the international pack. Even in top performing countries there is unmet need for organs.

The NZ Blood and Organ Service, which includes Organ Donation NZ (ODNZ), the agency that coordinates donations, wrote to Parliament’s Health Select Committee in May 2025.

A key priority should be funding dedicated, 24-hour donation specialist positions embedded within ICUs, the committee was told, as happens in Australia where nominated clinicians can step out of their day-to-day duties to solely work on organ donation, with cover brought in.

“Deceased organ donation rates could increase to around 115 donors per year (21 donors per million population), if New Zealand matched Australian and UK rates of identification of potential deceased organ donors and subsequent approach to whānau to discuss deceased donation (87-89%),” stated the letter, obtained by Stuff under the OIA.

“This increase could be achieved without any change in the current consent rate through implementing the right systems and expertise within donor hospitals.”

A small amount of funding has set up a “link team” of ICU clinicians, but the organ service said staffing was inadequate and very low compared to other countries, and much work was done out of goodwill.

A standing agreement with the Ministry of Health in 2018 covered a total annual budget of $750,000 for these roles, but according to the letter, this “was lost in the transfer of hospital services funding to Health NZ, along with reporting for accountability of use of this FTE”.

“We have been unsuccessful in addressing this with Health NZ. This funding sum would not provide the same FTE now, due to pay equity.”

Rachel Haggerty, Health NZ’s director of funding for hospitals, said the Health Committee had asked for a review of its investment in the 97 part-time trained link nurse roles, which had happened.

“Health New Zealand confirmed with the committee that the funding for Link Nurses was rolled into Health New Zealand operating budgets.”

Critical care capacity increased by a third from 2022 to 2025, Haggerty said, and 79% of physicians in the speciality had been trained in facilitating organ donation.

New Zealand’s transplant rates have been helped by more donations after circulatory death (patients with no chance of survival without ongoing life support).

However, if a family doesn’t know their loved one’s wishes the likelihood they agree to organ donation drops.

Organ Donation NZ supports the development of an opt-in organ donation registry, as happens in Australia and which has driven up the agreement rate for donation to about 55%.

“If 55% of whānau had agreed to donation in Aotearoa in 2024 there could have been between 90-100 donations,” Dr Jo Ritchie, clinical director for ODNZ, advised in a briefing produced in June. “This could mean up to 60 more kidney transplant recipients alone.”

Patient advocacy group Kidney Health NZ says measures to increase donations are long overdue, but the country also needs enough surgeons to cope with any improvement.

“A strong focus on prevention is essential if we are to reduce the number of people reaching end-stage disease,” says its chair Dave Shearer, a Christchurch businessman who recently received a kidney donated by his wife.

“We cannot transplant our way out of this growing problem.”

How many die while waiting?

Once on the wait list people are reassessed on paper every two years, and in person every four. They will be suspended if they have a medical condition like a heart attack or Covid-19 infection, and returned after recovery.

Outcomes for people entering the kidney transplant waitlist from 2005-19 were recently examined by biostatistician Dr Nicole De La Mata for ASSET Kidney Research.

The preliminary results found 55% were transplanted, 10% were still waiting, 13% were suspended and 22% died while waiting.

Median time to transplant ranged from 1 year for those never suspended, to 4.2 years for those suspended fewer than two times.

Some people who find a living donor but cannot proceed because of blood types or antibodies can be helped through an exchange programme with Australia, which allows these incompatible pairs to exchange a kidney with another such pair.

Dr Ian Dittmer says about 50 of the 450 patients waiting for a kidney in NZ have developed antibodies that would cause rapid rejection of a kidney from more than 95% of donors.

He is on sabbatical working on how to improve their chances, and is examining the potential use and registration of a new drug called imlifidase.

Craig agreed to this story to encourage people to think about organ donation. He’s grateful to have already outlived the life expectancy for someone his age on dialysis.

“Being sick for such a long time, you get a little bit philosophical. I try to not be in too much of a hurry now, I try to enjoy the little things in life.

“My kids are doing well, they're happy. I don't plan too far ahead. If [a transplant] happens one day, that'd be awesome. But otherwise I’ll just keep going.”