Where can you donate placenta and cord blood ?

[LucaFritz]

Tried looking online and im getting nowhere with this as it seems to be companies offering to store it for a cost but no way of just donating it! Im in the North East and my midwife said its upto me to arrange it all if i want to donate them and im shocked the nhs doesn't have an automatic donation process set up to receive these! So much life saving blood and tissue just thrown away every day

Only a few hospitals offer this service. AFAIK if you’re hospital doesn’t do it then donation isn’t an option.

That's insane considering how vital it is

May I ask .why ?

Why what ? I want to donate ? Because it has the possibility of savings lives of course. Cord blood and placenta tissue are vital in stem cell research and cancer treatment! Im so angry that the UK is so blind to this and behind compared to the rest of the world! All the babies that are born every day all the cord blood and placentas just thrown away like rubbish when if people were informed and a system in place they could save countless lives

The only public donation banks are run by NHSBT which serves 5 hospitals in London, and Anthony Nolan which does two in Leicester, one in Manchester and Kings in London.

It's so, so sad that these are the only places you can donate and even then it's only for births that occur between 8am and 8pm. It makes me so sad and angry that we don't have a national system or wider access to donate.

I used to work for Anthony Nolan coordinating donations from either unrelated volunteer donors or cord blood banks, and the systems in other countries like Spain where it's opt out for cord banking just make the UK look ridiculous given our national health system but no continuity in providing an incredible life saving resource that otherwise gets incinerated

Full info here

Why has this issue not been raised in parliament before or petitioned ? Its a national failure something has to change

I think to donate they want all the blood in the cord, but at least at my hospital they will leave it a minute or 2 for the blood to go to the baby

I gave birth in a hospital that took donations but as I gave birth outside their working hours it was thrown out!

Its in my birth plan that the cord isn't to be clamped for as long as i can possibly leave it so he gets the full benefit but im devastated the cord and placenta will just be thrown away or incinerated when there are people dying that need them

As I understand it the current cord banks are based in hospitals with higher local BAME communities, as it’s much more difficult to find unrelated donors from the current adult donor pool. Whilst I agree cord banking should be more widely available, cord and other allogeneic transplants are a sledge hammer treatment for awful diseases, and presumably the costs of expanding cord banking are enormous, and so it may be better to invest cash in novel curative therapies, that avoid transplantation.

It’s much better for your baby if you delay cord clamping so that they get the benefit of having their own blood. This then renders you ineligible to bank the cord blood anyway.

‘donate’ the cord blood to your baby. since it’s, yno, their blood