Kidney Score Guide (Guide du Score Rein)

What can I learn?

A public guide, published by France's Agence de la biomédecine, explaining the score that determines how donor kidneys are allocated for transplantation. It sets out how a score-based system tries to strike a transparent, ethical compromise between fairness, efficiency and feasibility, helping the public understand a genuinely consequential algorithmic decision.

Core insight

Some of the highest-stakes algorithms are in public health, and they encode explicit value trade-offs — between fairness, efficiency and what is practically possible. Publishing how the score works is itself an act of accountability.

How to use it in daily work

A rare, well-documented example of a life-and-death public algorithm being explained openly — useful for showing that scoring systems embed choices about fairness that can be examined.

• Use the kidney score to explain to a client what an "algorithmic allocation" actually is, in a domain where the stakes are obvious.
• Draw on the guide to discuss how fairness is defined and traded off inside a public scoring system.