Statement on Freedom to Donate and Unilad’s ‘Illegal Blood Bank’ campaign

The Government has set the three month deferral based on advice from a Department of Health and Social Care expert committee called SaBTO (Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs). Currently the blood services of England, Scotland and Wales have implemented these guidelines.

The Government set the three month deferral based on advice from SaBTO (Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs).

Read the committee's report

This campaign is not part of FAIR’s work.

We’ve been told it will be used for research. The blood will not enter the NHSBT supply chain.

The FAIR group hopes to report the findings of its’ research to SaBTO (Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs) towards the end of 2020 and SaBTO advises the Government on blood policy. It is not currently possible to say if a more individualised risk based approach can be safely and practically introduced.

No. We can supply the overall blood hospitals need. There are certain blood types where we need more donors – such as the Ro subtype, more commonly found in black people – though we can substitute O negative blood in those cases. Undonated blood does not ‘go to waste’.

We want as many people who want to donate to be able to donate, while ensuring patient safety remains our number one priority. We currently collect blood from 1.5% of the population, so there is a very large population group of potential new donors under the current guidelines who do not currently donate.

No. Overall demand for blood has been declining for 20 years because modern hospitals use less blood, thanks to newer guidelines and better equipment. NHSBT still makes regular appeals for donors because we need new donors to replace those people who can no longer donate for reasons such as age, or ill health, or because we need donors with types in particular high demand, such as O negative.

Anyone can acquire a blood-borne virus or a sexually transmitted disease, but some people have an increased risk of exposure. At a population level, men who have sex with men have a higher risk. Using protection like a condom or pre-exposure prophylaxis can reduce this risk, but it doesn’t always eliminate it. We have to consider not just the exposure of the donor but the potential behaviour of their partner.

All donors are asked to complete the same questionnaire. The questionnaire is not concerned with sexual orientation. It includes questions on exposure to risk, based on the best available expert evidence. These questions cover many things including travel, tattoos, illness, and sexual behaviour, which includes men having sex with men.

We have guidelines for good reasons. Anyone can acquire a blood-borne virus or a sexually transmitted disease, but some people have an increased risk of exposure. At a population level, men who have sex with men have a higher risk. We want as many people as possible to be able to donate safely. We’re currently working with a range of stakeholders including LGBT+ groups to explore and collect evidence to inform our work on a more individualised risk assessment approach to donor selection policy and we hope to report our findings towards the end of 2020.

There is a small possibility the tests we carry out are not able to pick up recently acquired infections. If someone was to donate blood during this time, known as a window period, it would be possible to transmit an infection.

We have more than 800,000 donors making around 1.4m blood donations a year so we need a system that is safe and can cope with large numbers of people. To move to a more individualised risk assessment, we need good evidence and we need to understand how it would work in practice. For example, we need to understand which questions are most relevant to the evidence of risk. We need to understand whether more detailed questions could put off some donors. We need to see if an online, or face to face approach, works best. This work takes time and we need to make sure everything we do is based on good evidence with patient safety as the number one priority.