Blood Donation
Message from the Board of ARA : A landmark agreement, six years in the making
The ARA can confirm a significant and long-awaited change to blood donation policy in the UK. JPAC, the Joint Professional Advisory Committee to the UK Blood Transfusion and Tissue Transplantation Services, has formally agreed to remove the deferral period currently applied to blood donors who have received acupuncture from a qualified, registered practitioner.
This follows six years of sustained work by the ARA, working alongside our member organisations, to challenge a policy that no longer reflected the reality of modern acupuncture practice.
The background
Since 2005, the Blood Safety and Quality Regulations have required a six-month deferral, or four months with hepatitis C testing, for anyone who has received acupuncture, unless that acupuncture was performed by a Qualified Health Care Professional. In practice, this meant the great majority of people treated by fully registered, licensed acupuncturists working outside the NHS were still subject to this restriction, regardless of the standard of care they received.
This policy dated back many years, to an incident involving inadequately sterilised needles. It took no account of the fact that modern acupuncture practice uses single-use, sterile needles as standard, supported by rigorous training, regulation and infection control across the profession.
The ARA did not think this was fair, and for six years we said so.
More than six years of persistence
This was never a quick campaign. It involved formal legal letters, detailed evidence submissions, direct and repeated engagement with the organisations responsible for blood safety policy, and a refusal to accept delay as a final answer. The key milestones along the way:
2019: Following extensive discussions, NHS Blood and Transplant Service confirmed its support and agreement for removing the four-month waiting period for acupuncture.
2020: ARA successfully argued for, and passed, a formal medical review of acupuncture procedures and infection control standards in the UK.
2022: An agreement was obtained from JPAC (the Joint United Kingdom Blood Transfusion and Tissue Transplantation Services Professional Advisory Committee), which is responsible for advising on donor selection and safety.
2023: An agreement was secured from SaBTO (the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs) to allow exemption from the waiting period for patients treated by practitioners registered with recognised acupuncture organisations.
2023: An agreement was reached in principle to abolish the four-month waiting period.
2024: Support for the revised position was confirmed by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). DHSC agreed to develop final recommendations for approval in consultation with the devolved health administrations.
2024: The devolved health administrations of all four UK nations were formally consulted and given the opportunity to raise objections.
2025: No objections were received from any of the four nations’ health departments.
2026: A proposed timeline was been agreed upon, with implementation of the revised guidelines expected by the end of Spring 2026.
2026: Implementation was agreed upon with changes to the JPAC website to represent these changes in August 2026, and that exemption for licenced acupuncturists will be allowed and rolled out from this date by the relevant blood service.
While timelines can be subject to delay, the most significant and complex work has now been completed. The key thing is that due to our negotiations, agreements have been reached across multiple departments of health and all four devolved administrations. This represents a major shift never accomplished before and places the profession in a strong position as the final stages of implementation proceed. as the blood donation services start to roll this out.
This is now not merely a verbal assurance or a provisional position, it is at last a formal written agreement, the result of six years of evidence, escalation and engagement that many told us would not succeed.
What this means in practice
Once implemented, patients who have received acupuncture from a practitioner registered or licensed in accordance with the relevant legislation in their nation will no longer be automatically deferred from donating blood. Blood services will ask donors whether they are satisfied the practitioner was licensed and the premises approved, plus they will expect sterile single-use needles to have been used. Where there is any doubt, a four-month deferral will still apply as a safety measure.
For practitioners, this is formal recognition of the standards the profession already holds itself to. For patients, it removes a restriction that no longer reflected the reality of safe, regulated acupuncture practice in the UK.
With thanks
This outcome would not have been possible without the tenacity of ARA CEO Chris Davies and BAWMA’s Tony Dickenson, who between them refused to let this issue stall despite years of delay, and who first secured the early agreements that made everything that followed possible. We are also grateful to our legal team, whose advice and formal correspondence throughout this process gave real weight to the ARA’s position at every stage.
The ARA represents more than 15 member organisations, including AAC and BAWMA, and this change benefits practitioners and patients across the whole of that community, and the wider acupuncture profession in the UK.
As with any significant change like this, it’s likely a number of organisations across the profession will want to comment on it in the coming days. That’s a good thing, this benefits the whole community, not just our members. But it’s always worth asking, of any claim like this, what the evidence actually looks like. Six years of dated correspondence, named contacts, formal minutes and a written agreement from JPAC itself is what we can show for our part. We’d encourage anyone reading updates on this to ask the same of anyone else making claims about it.
Author: Michelle Bebbington – ARA Board Member