Many students and employees at UCAM felt the satisfaction of giving life when they signed up for the Bone Marrow Donor Network this morning. The Murcia-based institution, through its Faculty of Nursing, brought the Regional Organ and Bone Marrow Donor Day to its campuses in Murcia and Cartagena, joining the national campaign ‘Un match por una vida’ (A match for a life), promoted by the Spanish National Transplant Organisation and the Josep Carreras Foundation, which aims to increase the number of bone marrow donors. This initiative also coincided today with the blood donation day organised by the Regional Blood Donation Centre on the Murcia Campus, which will take place tomorrow in Cartagena.

From early in the morning, members of the academic community came to find out about the campaign and register as donors. A simple blood sample will determine whether they are compatible with any of the leukaemia patients waiting for a donor.  

Dolores Hernández, haematology specialist and coordinator of the National Bone Marrow Plan of the National Transplant Organisation, and Ricardo Robles, Regional Transplant Coordinator, visited the blood collection stations set up at UCAM accompanied by Estrella Núñez, UCAM Vice-Rector of Research; Paloma Echevarría, Dean of the Faculty of Nursing, and Isabel Morales, lecturer and secretary of the Faculty, as well as other academic representatives and representatives from the Regional Blood Donation Centre.

Ricardo Robles emphasised that today is a historic day for the Region of Murcia as ‘we are the first autonomous community to dedicate a commemorative day to its donors, both organ and bone marrow donors; the first to organise it at national level’.  

Last year, more than 200 members of the UCAM academic community registered as new donors, a ‘spectacular’ number, according to the coordinator of the National Bone Marrow Plan at the National Organisation of Transplant, which ‘contributed significantly to Murcia recruiting 1,000 donors in a single day. We had never seen anything like it.’  

‘Volunteering is one of the essential parts of the university, especially as a Catholic university. We are very proud that every time we have an initiative of this kind or any other cause for volunteering, the community gets fully involved,’ said the UCAM Vice-Rector of Research.