Too many Canadians are dying needlessly every year, waiting for organ transplants, says a prominent transplant surgeon. And he says the problem lies in a lack of federal oversight.

Dr. Phil Halloran is the editor of the American Journal of Transplantation and one of Canada's foremost transplant surgeons. He says Canada is the only developed country he knows of without a national transplant organization.

While there are organ donation programs scattered across Canada, without a federal body overseeing them, Halloran estimates that almost 1,200 Canadians a year are not getting the life-saving organs they need.

"The health system is organized provincially, and some jobs that should be done nationally don't seem to get picked up nationally," Halloran told Canada AM.

"There are jobs in every country that have to be done by the federal government and they're not always picked up in systems that are provincially-based."

Halloran would like Canada to follow the lead of the United States, which has two key national agencies, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and the United Network for Organ Sharing.

UNOS and OPTN provide three services in the U.S.: set national standards for organ collection of organs; collect national data; and distribute organs across the U.S. based on need.

In Canada, interprovincial exchanges are rare, data collection is voluntary, and no national standards exist.

"It's quite a balkanized system and some parts of it in some regions are probably not functioning the way they should be functioning," he says.

On a per capita basis, Canada is lagging far behind the United States, performing only about 60 per cent of the transplants as our neighbours to the south, Halloran says.

"That translates into about 1,100 Canadians dying unnecessarily," he says.

"And the strange thing is that we could actually save money by doing that, because each time we transplant a kidney, we save the health system $100,000."

Halloran believes that a central agency would offer the best solution to "the dysfunction of the Canadian system," pointing to five jobs it should be managing on a national level:

• advocacy
• benchmarking and standards
• collection of data
• distribution of organs
• and engagement of other agencies like those in the United States.

"Really, those jobs have to be done federally; there isn't any other choice."