Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to engage with BAME communities on stem cell donations.
Since 2011 the Department has provided more than £26 million in financial support to NHS Blood and Transplant and Anthony Nolan to enable the establishment of a unified United Kingdom Stem Cell Registry and improve stem cell donation. This includes improving equity of access to unrelated donor stem cell transplantation for Black African Minority Ethnic (BAME) patients through targeted recruitment to the UK Stem Cell Registry and the Department has set specific targets about the proportion of donors that must be from BAME backgrounds.