Tissue Services

NHS Blood and Transplant, Tissue Services is the UK's major provider of human tissue for transplant. Our role is to co-ordinate, recover, process, bank and supply human tissue grafts for use in surgery within the National Health Service (NHS) and the independents within the Health Care sector. As part of the NHS we operate as a not-for-profit organisation, where patient safety is at our core.

We supply tissue grafts from around 400 donors per year and respond on a 24-hour basis to over 2,000 donor referrals. Our key objectives are to provide high quality, cost effective tissue grafts for the benefit of patients, and every effort is made to ensure the safety and efficacy of our products. And it is not just patients that are important to us. We work in collaboration with coroners, pathologists and NHS partners to provide donor families with access to a team of specially trained nurses. Their role is to discuss the donation options and help facilitate the donation process. We also offer a live bone donor programme, where patients who are having hip replacement surgery can donate the bone they are having removed as it will just be discarded, at the moment we have 3200 live donors and 4000 deceased donor referrals per year and we are working with 75 hospitals