Students will get the chance to become potential lifesavers when Harrogate Grammar School joins forces with charity Anthony Nolan to boost the number of people on the blood stem cell donor register.
Anthony Nolan matches volunteers willing to donate their blood stem cells to people with blood cancer in need of a lifesaving transplant.
Representatives from the charity will be signing up students and teachers who wish to join the donor register at a special event at Harrogate Grammar School on Tuesday 11th June 2013.
To join the register, donors must be aged 16 or over and need to fill in a form and give a saliva sample.
Staff at Harrogate Grammar School were inspired to hold a recruitment event after hosting Register and Be a Lifesaver (R&Be), Anthony Nolan’s education programme which teaches 16 to 18-year-olds about the importance of blood, organ and blood stem cell donation. Students listened to presentations which helped explain the importance of donation and dispel myths about the processes involved.
Katie Campling, R&Be Supervisor at Anthony Nolan, said:
There are lots of myths about blood stem cell donation and R&Be aims to dispel those and encourage more people to register as donors.
We’re absolutely delighted that Harrogate Grammar School are helping us to take our work one step further by holding this recruitment event. Our research has shown that the younger the donor, the better the outcome for the patient, so adding more students to the register will help us to save more lives.
The recruitment event will be held at Harrogate Grammar School from 12pm on Tuesday 11th June.
There are currently over 440,000 people on the Anthony Nolan register, but the charity would like to grow this to give even more people the chance of life.
They particularly need to recruit young men aged 16-30, as they are most commonly chosen to donate, yet they account for just 12% of the donor register. To join the register, please visit www.anthonynolan.org/spit.
To book an R&Be talk, please contact Katie Campling on Katie.campling@anthonynolan.org or 020 7284 8264.
