Donating your cord blood is a risk free procedure.

At present, you can only donate cord blood at King’s College Hospital or The Royal Free Hospital in London, and the Leicester Royal Infirmary and Leicester General Hospital. We’re opening a fifth centre at Birmingham Women’s Hospital in mid-June 2012. The NHS also runs a cord blood bank where you can donate from a further six hospitals in Greater London.

There will be more collection centres opening in the near future but at the moment they are the only options. You can only donate if you are booked for antenatal care at one of these three hospitals.

To assess your eligibility, you should not offer to donate your cord blood if you have ever knowingly:

• injected drugs for non-medical reasons

• received money or drugs in exchange for sex

• been diagnosed with HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C

In the last 12 months you have had sex knowingly with:

• a partner who has had sex with someone in exchange for money or drugs

• a partner who injects drugs for non-medical reasons

• a partner who has been diagnosed with HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C

• a man who has had sex with another man

To register to donate, you can either email cordblood@anthonynolan.org to register your interest and we will contact you to take you through the next steps of the process, or call 0303 303 0303 to discuss the process further.

What happens next?

We will send you our cord brochure and make an appointment for you to meet one of our staff prior to your due date. If you are unable to meet with one of our team at the hospital prior to your due date there is a sticker in the brochure that gives you the option of ‘pre-consent’. This means that if you place it on the front of your medical notes, you intend to donate. Ideally we'd like your formal consent before you go into labour, but the sticker gives us permission to collect your baby’s cord blood. The formal consent would then take place following the birth of your baby.

Once your baby has been safely delivered, the umbilical cord will be clamped as normal, and the cord and placenta will be passed to one of our dedicated collecting staff who will take it to a separate room to extract the blood from the cord. We are able to process this blood at our Cell Therapy Centre in Nottingham to extract the potentially life saving stem cells that it contains. The placenta and umbilical cord is normally disposed of as clinical waste, so whilst our collection does not interfere with your birth experience, you can be happy in the knowledge that this act of recycling may help save someone’s life. Donating your baby's umbilical cord blood is a risk free procedure and does not interfere with the safe delivery of your baby in any way.

Following your donation we will need to visit you whilst you are still in hospital to take a maternal blood sample from you, and go through some consent questions if you have not already completed the formal consent procedure.