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Bone marrow donor stranger is now ‘like a brother’

Media playback is unsupported on your device Bone marrow donor stranger is now 'like a brother' 17 September 2016 Last updated at 10:56 BST
When Carl Hillis was struck with cancer at the age of nine, he received bone marrow from a perfect stranger.
Eight years later, Carl is fighting fit and has formed a strong friendship with Tony Blood, the donor who saved his life.

New unit

Is a hospital a useful unit of spending? Image copyright PA Politicians and commentators appear to have settled on a new unit of measuring public spending – the hospital. So how much does a hospital actually cost?
You might have noticed a new unit of measurement for expenditure.
The Vote Leave campaign, for instance, declared during the referendum on European Union membership: “The EU costs us £350 million a week. That's enough to build a new NHS hospital every week of the year.”
Image copyright PA Image caption The controversial Vote Leave campaign bus MEP Daniel Hannan tweeted: “According to the European Court of Auditors, €7 billion of the 2013 budget was misspent. Enough to build 10 state-of-the-art NHS hospitals.”
Meanwhile, the Huffington Post reported: “Jeremy Corbyn Wants To Abolish The UK's Trident Nuclear Deterrent. This Is What The £100 Billion Could Buy At The Same Time… 56 Hospitals.”
But there's a problem. None of them agree how much a hospital actually costs to build.
The Leave campaign put the cost of a new hospital at £350m, Hannan at £600m (700 million euros) and the Huffington Post at £178m.
So what is the actual price tag?
Find out more Image copyright PA Hear Jordan Dunbar's report for More or Less on BBC iPlayer Radio Download the More or Lesspodcast More stories from More or Less It's very difficult to give a definitive cost for building a hospital, says Prof John Appleby, a health economist at Nuffield Trust, because it fluctuates so wildly.
“The reason it varies massively is that hospitals come in all shapes and sizes. Some of these capital costs will be for bits of hospitals, some will be for relocating hospitals on green-field sites like the Norfolk and Norwich hospital.
“Others are new builds on old sites so they vary in their function and they vary in their size.”
It's the wrong measurement because it implies we should be having lots more hospitals Prof John Appleby, Health economist At the lower end of the scale, there's a hospital project in Cornwall that cost just £7m – that was a mental health unit – but by contrast the reconstruction of Bart's hospital in London cost £1.1bn – over 150 times more expensive.
And of course, lots of NHS care isn't delivered in hospitals – it is in GP surgeries and out in the community.
“It's actually completely the wrong measurement because it somehow implies we should be having lots more hospitals when maybe that's not the way medicine is going over time,” says Appleby.
“If you look at hospital beds the numbers have been decreasing slowly.
Image copyright PA “The reason for that is medicine has moved on and people don't need to stay in hospital so long. We just don't need as many beds.
“It's not that we need more hospitals – we may need shinier, newer hospitals to replace older ones.”
Many hospitals are ramshackle buildings ranging from portakabins to Victorian workhouses spread across huge sites. Often the priority is to turn these into more efficient, greener buildings with a smaller carbon footprint rather than building new hospitals.
So it seems that using hospitals as a unit of measurement is not a great idea.
What could politicians use instead? The cost of operations would be one possibility, says Appleby. For example, a hip operation costs about £5,000 to £6,000.
Image copyright PA Image caption An MRI scanner at Sheffield Children's Hospital – a more consistent unit of spending? Or they could try MRI scanners. These come in at £895,000, and that price is pretty standard across the NHS.
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