Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to encourage BAME people to sign up to the stem cell donor register.

The Department funds Anthony Nolan and NHS Blood Transplant to improve equity of access to unrelated donor stem cell transplantation for Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) patients through targeted recruitment to the Anthony Nolan and the NHS Stem Cell Registry.

More than £20 million has been provided to NHS Blood and Transplant and Anthony Nolan for stem cell donation since 2015, and this funding includes very specific stipulations about the numbers of newly registered bone marrow donors, and the proportion of umbilical cords stored in the UK Cord Blood Bank that must be from BAME backgrounds (35-40%). This includes specific funding to support recruitment of donors from BAME backgrounds.

In 2016 NHS Blood Transplant began a partnership with Team Margot and launched the Golden Ticket campaign. This project created 35,000 Golden Tickets which were circulated to existing BAME and mixed-race blood donors to encourage them to sign on to the stem cell donor register.