Bone and tissue bank PlusLife was on the brink of closing in recent years due to a lack of support.
The state’s only bone and tissue bank, PlusLife, has relocated to Midland, after the state government put $10 million in funding towards its new building, which officially opened over the weekend.
PlusLife has been producing bone grafts for people suffering from cancer, deformities or injury for 25 years, since managing director Anne Cowie and her secretary started out with just two freezers.
The not for profit now has 24 staff and provides about 1,000 grafts to around 600 Western Australian recipients per year.
However, Mrs Cowie said PlusLife was recently on the brink of closing, struggling to locate a new space to operate, given developments by Hollywood Private Hospital meant it could no longer lease a building to the NFP.
“We’d been looking for several years,” she said.
“We got to the point where really, unless we were able to get some financial support to relocate, we were going to have to close.
“It came to the crunch in 2015; we had to mount a political campaign to get some government support and thankfully, in the 2015-16 budget, the government allocated $10 million to build a new facility, which we now lease from them.”
Mrs Cowie said one of PlusLife’s biggest issues was its lack of profile among philanthropists and across the local community, despite providing a valuable service that was free to the public.
“We can recover a graft fee each time (from the federal government), but that’s not really a sustainable system,” she said.
“Our major push this year will be about promoting awareness about who PlusLife is and what we do, because we’re hoping to be able to get some support.”
Predominately, grafts by PlusLife are used for children and adolescents with spinal deformities.
“Also young people with bone cancer, instead of having to have an amputation we can give them a bone graft,” Mrs Cowie said.
Complex joint revision surgeries, sporting and motor vehicle injuries, dental procedures, and facial and reconstructive procedures caused by cancer or injury are other reasons for bone grafts.
About 15 deceased donors within Western Australia provide bone, tissue, tendons and ligaments to PlusLife each year, while about 800 living donors per year will donate the ball part of the hip joint when undergoing a hip replacement.
“The thing about organ donation is they’re lifesaving; but because bone and tissue donations are about improving wellbeing and mobility for people, then you want to be very careful that you’re not applying another risk to a patient that might be transmitted like viral illnesses,” Mrs Cowie said.
She said the heavy regulation of the tissue sector by the Therapeutic Goods Administration meant Australia’s tissue banks were among the world’s safest, but it was very costly to operate within the space.
PlusLife was an independent entity, Mrs Cowie said, while tissue banks in other states were part of a government department or under a parent hospital, excluding one commercial tissue bank in NSW.
