Bone Marrow Donor Registry Awarded Three-Year Funding Agreement
The Australian Government has signed a three-year $7.4 million funding agreement with the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry.
View by date:
Previous MinistersPDF printable version of Bone Marrow Donor Registry Awarded Three-Year Funding Agreement (PDF 29 KB)
25 August 2011
The Australian Government has signed a three-year $7.4 million funding agreement with the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry (ABMDR) Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Ageing Catherine King announced today.
The agreement is among the first under the Department of Health and Ageing’s National Alignment (DNA), which aims to increase the use of multi-year funding agreements.
“These initiatives are being introduced to develop longer-term and more streamlined relationships between the government and providers and to reduce the administration workload for the department and funding recipients,” Ms King said.
“Multi-year agreements give organisations a greater sense of financial security where they are able to show a history of performance at a satisfactory standard. The ABMDR has been allocated funding from the Government since 1991 and has played an important role in saving lives around the world,” she said.
The funding will help the ABMDR to manage and coordinate the national bone marrow register, benefiting those awaiting a transplant as well as potential donors.
The ABMDR maintains an electronic database to match adult volunteers in Australia with compatible patients in need of haemopoietic progenitor cell (HPC) transplants. HPC transplants are most commonly used to treat patients with leukaemia or other blood cancers and often are the only available cure.
“271 Australian patients received bone marrow, peripheral or cord blood stem cell transplants in the 2010-11 financial year as a result of the work of the ABMDR,” Ms King said.
“But we still need more awareness of the register among younger Australians, as only people aged between 18 and 40 can register as donors”.
The funding will also be used towards the International Donor Registries Project, which provides financial assistance to eligible patients with life-threatening illnesses who need to search internationally for a compatible HPC donor.
In the 2010-11 financial year, the ABMDR undertook searches of international donor registries on behalf of 514 Australian patients, ensuring that the best possible matched donor was identified.
Over the same period the ABMDR helped identify 34 Australian bone marrow donors for international patients.
For all inquiries, contact the Parliamentary Secretary's office 02 6277 4230
Help with accessing large documents
When accessing large documents (over 500 KB in size), it is recommended that the following procedure be used:
- Click the link with the RIGHT mouse button
- Choose "Save Target As.../Save Link As..." depending on your browser
- Select an appropriate folder on a local drive to place the downloaded file
Attempting to open large documents within the browser window (by left-clicking)
may inhibit your ability to continue browsing while the document is
opening and/or lead to system problems.
Help with accessing PDF documents
To view PDF (Portable Document Format) documents, you will need to have a PDF reader installed on your computer. A number of PDF readers are available through the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) Web Guide website.