BMTBasics.org offers both specific information needed by Washington families and looks at BMT access issues from an equity perspective. All patient families, no matter where they live, need information that is reliable, readily available, and easy to understand, on every aspect of the BMT process. Information about the special issues faced by mixed heritage and other underserved patients is also urgenlty needed but has been even more difficult to find until now. Therefore, we hope that this website will make a significant contribution to helping equalize the chances for all our children to benefit from medical advances that now can save lives.

This website was created to assist Washington families whose child needs to undergo a blood cell or marrow transplant (BMT) to treat a life-threatening illness. Once the BMT decision has been made, families need to begin to prepare for all the many non-medical aspects of this complex procedure that affect not only the patient but the entire family. We hope that this website will provide guidance and support for the journey ahead. For this reason, you will find references to other materials on the medical aspects of BMT, and detailed information about the vital daily needs of every BMT patient family: information, organization, and resources.

The information presented in this website is both general and specific. Because the patient families that MAVIN serves are in need of unrelated BMT donors, we begin by discussing the topics of matching and the donor search process, and then move on to topics that are relevant to all BMT patient families.

Feel free to skip over sections that do not apply to your situation, as well as to refer back as needed to specific topics. You will notice also that for topics about which a great deal of information is readily available, such as the BMT process itself, or about specific diseases, we have included only basic information with links to reliable in-depth resources.