Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans he has for NHS Blood and Transplant to extend the collection of ethnic origin data to all sources of organ donation registration.

It is not mandatory for an individual to specify their ethnicity when joining the NHS Organ Donor Register (ODR). However, all registration routes operated by NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) ask individuals for their ethnic origin. In addition, NHSBT encourages new and existing registration partners to capture ethnicity where possible, but this can be difficult to implement when ethnicity is not recorded as part of the transaction, such as applications for a driving licence or registration through the Boots Advantage Card.

NHSBT is currently redesigning the ODR from June 2015. This will then enable the capture of the religious affiliation of registrants through its own registration routes. The new ODR will also enable NHSBT to capture ethnicity data in line with classifications of ethnic group used by the Office for National Statistics.