Mette-Marit leaves hospital smiling

Lung transplantation in Norway

Rikshospitalet, part of Oslo University Hospital (OUS), is the only hospital in Norway that performs lung transplants. Around 30 are carried out each year; OUS figures cited in Norwegian media put the 2025 total at 36. For comparison, roughly 250 kidney transplants are performed annually. According to those figures, about two-thirds of the lung transplants in 2025 were for patients with pulmonary fibrosis. The number of operations is limited primarily by the availability of donor organs.

A patient is placed on the waiting list only once their expected survival without a transplant is estimated at one to two years. It is not a numbered queue in which patients simply move up: when a donor lung becomes available, the best-matched and sickest suitable patient is prioritised. Dr Holm has previously stressed that the Crown Princess would receive no preferential treatment.

Specialists quoted in Norwegian media describe the typical wait as somewhere between roughly five months and a year, though a well-matched organ can appear sooner — and once a match is found, the operation becomes a matter of hours. A lung transplant is a major procedure that carries significant risk, and recipients must take strong immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives. Clinicians describe it as a life-saving intervention rather than a palliative one, with more than an 80 per cent chance that a patient survives at least five years after surgery.