Rockline helps through Anthony Nolan Donor Drive
One of our colleagues Mark Neale was diagnosed with Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia (blood cancer) in February of this year. Mark has undergone a variety of different treatments but unfortunately none of these have had the positive results that Mark or his family were hoping for.
The only option left for Mark is to undergo a bone marrow transplant. This procedure has an 80% success rate if a suitable donor can be found. Unfortunately there is a very long waiting list which makes the search for a donor a very prolonged affair. One of the ways that we at Rockline felt we could help Mark and thousands of other sufferers around the world, was to ask our employees to join the Anthony Nolan donor register.
We have been working closely with Macmillan Cancer Support on a number of other projects, so they kindly put us in touch with the Anthony Nolan Trust, the UK blood cancer charity. With the help of the Anthony Nolan Trust we have organised a Donor Drive on our premises which will be taking place on Thursday 6th September 2012 and we are encouraging all eligible employees to come along and join.
Not only did we have great support from our own staff but we also had other local businesses who came along and registered, notably Oakland International and e-response recruitment. Even the chap who fills our drinks machines registered!
Joining the donor register is simple and only takes approximately 5-10 minutes. After the completion of a short application form, a small sample of saliva is taken. The sample then gets sent away to the Anthony Nolan labs where the tissue is screened against any potential matches. Once a suitable match has been made the procedure for donating stem cells can begin, this is also a much more simpler affair, with over 90% of people now donating via blood (rather than bone marrow), which is a very non-invasive procedure. The body can replace all the donated cells in a couple of weeks but those donated cells can go onto help the patient rebuild their immune system and help beat cancer.