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LONDON, May 16LONDON, May 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Staff at the National Blood Service in Colindale and Edgware are ready to take industrial action to defend their jobs and to stop the fragmentation of clinical services.
The National Health Service Blood and Transplant services (NHSBT) in Colindale intend to make all its clinical scientists and highly specialist scientists working in the histocompatibility and immunogenetics department redundant. 450 people are employed at that site.
The NHSBT intend to move the histocompatability and immunogenic department along with the cord blood bank to Bristol. Unite members say there is no business case to support the management's proposals.
If no progress is made Unite have planned to conduct a ballot for industrial action. Unite members at Colindale say that ethnic minorities will suffer as a result of the change. Ethnic Minorities are under represented within bone marrow donors. As a result, patients from ethnic minorities are less likely than caucasian patients to find matched bone marrow donors. The NHS-CBB collects cord blood units from NHS maternity units with local populations from a broad ethnic diversity. This improves the probability that NHS patients from ethnic minority groups, especially children, will find a matched source of stem cells for transplantation. Notably, 37% of donations supplied by the NHS-CBB are for patients from ethnic minorities compared to 2% from the British Bone Marrow Registry (BBMR), because of the ethnic mix of the population around London.
Unite regional officer, Tina Mackay says,
"Our members are outraged by this decision. The National Blood Service are making highly skilled scientists redundant based on a business case that does not stand up to scrutiny.
Unless there is a change of direction from the NHSBT, Unite will have no option but to ballot for industrial action. At the end of the day, it will be the patients who will suffer as a result of this re-organisation and the lives of ethnic minorities requiring bone marrow transplants are most at risk."
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