With public services and public expenditure under growing pressure, it is increasingly important to find ways to join up across government silos in order to make most efficient use of public resources. The 10 minute rule bill I introduced this week was one such example. In my speech, I called for a bill to establish a duty on schools and colleges in England with pupils aged 16 years and over to enable pupils to gain greater understanding of the processes and benefits of blood, organ and bone marrow donation.
The bill aims to address the steadfast shortfall in blood, organ and bone marrow donors, which is a particular concern among ethnic minorities. Every 20 minutes in the UK, someone is diagnosed with a blood cancer such as leukaemia. Sixteen hundred people need a bone marrow transplant from a suitable matching donor to treat blood cancer or a blood disease. A matching sibling donor does not always exist and for 70 per cent of patients the kindness of a stranger on a register of volunteer donors is the last hope of life. For half those in need, that match will not be found.
The problem is more acute for ethnic minorities. White northern Europeans have a 90 per cent chance of finding a bone marrow donor, but that falls to just 40 per cent for people from BAME backgrounds. A person’s bone marrow tissue type is based on 10 genetic markers, which must closely match those of their donor. Among ethnic minority populations the range of these markers is great, resulting in a greater range of tissue types and a reduced chance of a successful patient and donor match.
There are volunteer programmes to encourage donors, but a more comprehensive solution is needed. Meeting the donor shortfall can be accelerated by educating young people about how they could save a life, a true example of how our education and health services can join up in a very simple way to solve a national problem. That was the belief of Adrian Sudbury after whom the call for this law, Adrian’s law, is named. Adrian was a 25-year-old journalist when he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2006. He believed that many more people like him could be helped if donation was far better understood.
Adrian campaigned alongside friends and family for an education project to equip 16-to-18-year olds with the facts about bone marrow, blood and organ donation and to bust the myths around those donation processes. That campaign became ‘Register and Be a Lifesaver’, the education project managed by Anthony Nolan and NHS Blood and Transplant that started shortly after Adrian’s death in 2008. The programme has been run with the support and drive of Keith and Kay Sudbury, Adrian’s parents, with Keith’s background as a headteacher being invaluable.
In a flexibly delivered training session that needs to last only 30 to 40 minutes, young people learn the facts about donation and signing up to the donor register. Indeed, since the school project began in 2009, more than 1,400 young people have joined the organ donor register and 5,000 have signed up to donate blood.
But this is not just a numbers game. Reaching more young people, and quickly, will help us find matching donors and reduce the number of people who die while waiting for that lifesaving match. There is also the question of donor availability. A clinician prefers a younger bone marrow donor for their patient, as a younger donor is less likely to have any health conditions that prevent them from donating or that delay donation.
Education on citizenship embeds responsibility to our communities, creating a generation committed to volunteering, so why not, by the same measure, consider education on donation as a means to ensure a healthy future for those who need blood transfusions and organ or bone marrow transplants?
However, the political reality is, of course, clear. To introduce even a small measure like this, for which there is a clear ‘business case’ and demonstrable need, it requires a sense of vision about how government works best and that there must some national interventions for the greater good. While allowing for total local flexibility about how it might be delivered, which is the principle of localism in the strategy, it does ask that government make a decision that it is needed. The current coalition has far from reconciled an overall framework for public service reform that has a clear balance and understanding of the role of the centre, as we see a dismantling of so much of our national institutional infrastructure.
I hope, however, that through an ongoing campaign we will see progress, and see this duty established for schools and colleges – a measure that would make a real difference to the healthcare of so many in Britain and abroad.
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Seema Malhotra is the Labour MP for Feltham and Heston. She tweets @SeemaMalhotra1
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