Donor Leave Saves Lives
The Life-Saving Leave Act (H.R. 7770) 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. 7770) 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 non-consecutive 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. 40% of donors will also need to travel during the donation process.
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.