Covering your travel expenses

Plasma donors who attend an appointment at Birmingham, Reading or Twickenham donor centres are eligible to make a claim after each donation appointment that they attend.

You can claim up to £20 towards the cost of your travel. You can make a claim each time you have attended a plasma appointment.

You can only submit a claim after you have attended your appointment. You must submit claims within 30 days of date of your appointment.

We aim to complete your claim within 45 days of receiving it.

Yes, if you attended your booked appointment you can claim for your travel. We recognise that on some occasions donors are unable to complete a donation. For example, if a donor attends but cannot donate due to low haemoglobin, they will still be eligible to receive reimbursement for their travel.

You can claim up to £20 against the cost of rail tickets, bus fares, parking charges, tram fares and ULEZ charges/clean air zone charges.

If you are unable to use public transport to get to our donor centres and need the additional support a taxi will give you to get to your appointment, please contact us at PlasmaDonorTravelSupport@nhsbt.nhs.uk and we can discuss with you how we may be able to support you.

We made the decision not to include mileage expenses in this pilot. We have designed the pilot around feedback from plasma donors and have aimed to remove the main donation barriers, such as the cost of parking and train tickets.

We are also encouraging our donors to use public transport where possible. We will be listening to feedback from donors throughout the pilot and it will inform decisions for any potential future expenses processes.

You will need to provide photos or screenshots of receipts for rail tickets, bus fares, parking charges, tram fares and ULEZ/clean air zone charges. 

No, you will need to submit one form per appointment that you have attended.

Yes, all new and existing donors can make travel expense claims during the period of the pilot.

If you do not want to receive expenses for your travel, you do not have to participate. No action is required; you will only receive expenses following a claim.

No. You can only make travel expense claims for appointments that you attend from 10 November 2025 onwards.

Our 12-month pilot to reimburse travel for plasma donors is because we need to attract new donors to grow our plasma donor base, reduce the number of donors who donate once and never return and to encourage our existing donors to donate more frequently (ideally six times in a 12-month period).

We will use the learnings from the pilot to determine whether we should offer the same ability to our blood and platelet donors. By collecting more plasma in England from our donors the NHS can reduce its reliance on imported medicines by making our own.

We have a responsibility to ensure that we can meet patient need and so there are people with certain blood types that we would always encourage to donate blood, for example RO, O negative and B negative blood types.

If people with other blood types, living within 30 miles of our three plasma centres would like to change to plasma we can support their choice.

No, this pilot is only available to plasma donors. If you change to blood or platelet donation then you will not be eligible to make a claim for those appointments.

The pilot is scheduled to run for 12 months, starting on 1st December 2025.

Throughout the pilot, we will continuously monitor performance and gather feedback. Please note that we reserve the right to end the pilot early or extend it beyond the initial timeframe if necessary.

The pilot creates an opportunity for us to understand whether reimbursing donors for costs they have incurred in donating will encourage donors to donate more regularly, or to consider donating when they haven’t previously.

Yes, some countries do. There is however a difference between countries like the US, Germany, the Czech Republic and Hungary where donors are paid, and countries like the UK, the rest of Europe and Australia where donors are not paid for their donation.

All countries are struggling to increase the number of people who donate, more in countries with altruistic donation models where donors are not paid for their blood donation, with only small percentages of populations choosing to donate and help others.

We are using existing budgets to fund travel during this pilot; we already spend money on marketing to attract new donors. We must consider the most effective use of those budgets.

Simply, affordability. Most of our donors live within a 40-minute drive time of donor centres, so having researched travel routes/ modes of transport to each donor centre and that is how we arrived at the £20 cap.

Prior to the pilot most of our donors were funding their own travel, and the pilot will also help us understand whether this contribution removes barriers to donation for current and new donors, and whether it increases the frequency of donation.