Donor Leave Saves Lives
The Life Saving Leave Act (H.R. 3024) will allow more donors to say yes when they get the call that they could be a life-saving match for a patient in need by ensuring bone marrow and blood stem cell donors nationwide have up to 40 non-consecutive, unpaid hours of leave without a risk to their jobs.
How does the Life Saving Leave Act save more lives?
Donors should be able to say yes to answering the call to save a life without the fear of losing their job.
There are patients with matches on the Registry who are not getting a transplant because their donor cannot take time off work. Patients and donors often share the same race and ethnicity. The likelihood a patient has a fully matched donor on the Nation's Registry varies from 29% for Black patients to 79% for white patients.
Those patients who have a harder time finding a match on the registry are also impacted by their potential matches reporting not having the same access to time off work or job protections for donating.
What does the Life Saving Leave Act mean for employers?
The Life Saving Leave Act (H.R. 3024) has minimal to no fiscal impact on employers. Each year, fewer than 10,000 potential donors are call as a match for a patient in need. But, for each of these patients, their potential donor represents their hope for survival.
38 states have some form of donor job protection laws. The Life Saving Leave Act would provide a universal standard for every employer in the nation, making it administratively simple to provide their employees time off to make a life-saving donation with minimal impact on their daily operations.
Donors need up to 40 nonconsecutive hours to complete their donation including meetings with a donation coordinator, providing blood samples, a physical exam, injections of a pre-donation medication administered over five days for most donors, travel to the donation site, completing the donation, and a short recovery period. During the donation process, 40% of donors will also need to travel.
What is NMDP/Be The Match asking Congress?
We are asking Members of Congress to support the Life Saving Leave Act to allow bone marrow and blood stem cell donors up to 40 non-consecutive, unpaid hours of leave to answer the call for blood cancer and blood disease patients in need.
Ask your legislators to help today.