Jemma Falkenmire

Yeah, I think there's some pretty historic changes being made to blood donation that a lot of people from the community have been wanting and waiting for.

So our blood donation sexual activity rules are changing today and effectively what they will mean is that gay and bisexual men and trans people in monogamous long-term relationships will become eligible for the first time in Australian history.

So the donor questionnaire form that people fill in before they donate will

will no longer have a question about men having sex with men.

Rather, people of all genders will be asked the same questions about new partners, launching a really fair and equitable set of questions before people donate.

Yeah, so the way blood donation works is that we have to ask donors questions before they donate.

And that's because testing doesn't always pick up a new infection.

And so what we do is look within the population to see where those cases of new infections are occurring.

And we then ask people as a group not to donate.

It's almost a bit like a COVID lockdown.

It's about the groups that you're in.

And so HIV was obviously the reason why these rules were introduced.

But it is only the last five to 10 years where new cases of HIV have come down in Australia to a point where we had the evidence and research to say there would be no change to the safety of the blood supply.

And so I guess that's the first step for us.

It's having that research and evidence.

And from there, there is quite a process to go through to actually get those changes happening, which is the same for all our blood donation rules.

We have to go through a process with the Therapeutic Goods Administration and making a submission, doing any research that they need for us to make the change.

And we then had to go through a process with governments and changing a legal change to our donor questionnaire forms.

And so it has taken us many years of work to get to this point.

Yeah, so our modelling shows that we will be looking at around 20,000 donations every year, which is amazing, really.