Special Leave for Living Organ and Bone Marrow Donors Available in Three Months

Living organ donors will be entitled to request special leave and permission within three months, before the end of March, ensuring they do not suffer any loss of salary or income, nor any disruption in their job due to their generosity. This is the time frame lawmakers deem necessary for Social Security and ministries to prepare for its implementation following its imminent publication in the BOE.

The Congress of Deputies, without the votes of PP or Vox, today definitively approved the law creating these specific and paid work licenses to protect those who donate organs in life to enable a kidney or liver transplant, and those who provide stem cells for bone marrow transplants, as well as citizens who donate tissues, such as skin or bone, for grafts.

The approved regulation arises from a PSOE bill aimed at ensuring that this act of absolute altruism, which often saves the life of a relative or close one, does not entail any labor or economic cost for the donor, a situation not guaranteed by current legislation. It is a reform demanded for years by patient associations and the National Transplant Organization (ONT), understanding that many of these citizens suffer inconveniences and headaches at work and in life due to their generosity.

The legal reform guarantees that any person will receive 100% of their salary for all the days they need to be absent from work to make the donation (from the first management to the last day of recovery) and that none of these absences can cause them any labor disadvantage, much less dismissal. The new benefits not only aim to prevent harm and provide security to the living donor but also aspire to encourage this type of organ, stem cell, and tissue donations, which in Spain enable nearly 1,000 transplants and grafts each year.

The regulation foresees two reforms. The first provides legal and economic coverage for all necessary work absences to carry out the initial phase of donation, the preparations. The Workers' Statute and the Public Employee Statute will include a paid and mandatory leave covering all necessary absences (hours or days) to receive information about the donation and its consequences, conduct reports and medical examinations to determine suitability and compatibility as a donor, and to materialize "express, free, and conscious" consent before the judge.

The second reform will amend the laws regulating the different Social Security regimes to create a new special situation of temporary incapacity for the living donor to cover the entire convalescence, from medical preparation for tissue, marrow, or organ extraction (or fragment, in the case of the liver) until recovery from surgery or the necessary clinical procedure and discharge. This medical leave, it specifies, will not require any minimum contribution period to apply, will cover 100% of the salary from the first to the last day, and will pay for both uninterrupted and discontinuous incapacity days.

The reform is necessary because the current legislation guarantees Spaniards who make such donations only ordinary medical leave from admission for surgery or extraction until discharge, with the possible loss of the first days of salary and without legal or economic coverage or protection against dismissals due to the many work absences required by these medical, legal, and administrative preliminaries.