June was an exceptionally busy month with low blood stocks and high demand. Let’s see what Sankalp was up to in this month.
Emergency Wing
Come summers and the emergency wing goes into a full blown emergency mode. Firstly, summers is a time when there is shortage of blood leading to more emergency requests. Secondly, several of our volunteers go back home for their annual vacations. This June too the emergency wing of Sankalp was extremely busy with the number of blood requests. With an average of 6-7 blood requests coming in as emergencies each day, the volunteers had tough time ensuring safe blood on time for all. Summarizing June: 10 Bombay blood group requests were handled, demand for a lot of platelets was taken care of and exceptional effort was put in to ensure that the people from North Karnataka (where the stocks of blood are extremely low) were promptly helped.
DISHA
In June the statewide help line received twice as many requests as we get normally in the first fortnight. With more blood banks in Bangalore suffering from massive shortage of blood and with camps out of sight, there were more and more people out there who were looking for blood and therefore the number of calls increased. The most difficult part was that once the shortage kicked in, several hospital based institutions became less willing to cater to the needs of the patients from outside(in order to save the units for any demand which may arise in-house) leading to the situation becoming worse.
Eventually after the World Blood Donor Day, the situations seemed to come back on track. As the voluntary blood donation increased, the number of calls gradually came back to normal. We hope that the stocks of blood will remain good in the months to come.
Thalassemia Day Care
As the city faced acute shortage of blood in June, the heat was felt at the thalassemia day care. Since it's inception, we have never asked the family members of the patients to organise for blood. But when the blood banks went dry and the camps were hard to come, the situation became very volatile. Several patients travel from far of places to Bangalore and if the blood unit is not made available on the same day then they have to stay back and loose upon their regular work apart from the increased cost of stay in Bangalore.
Added to this, only a couple of blood banks follow the NACO guideline to issue blood free of charge to the people suffering from thalassemia. With extremely poor patients attending the day care facility, the options available to us were further reduced.
In order to ensure continued availability of blood the following things were done:
- A large number of walk in donations were organised. Several donors from the new donor pool which was created last month at Robert Bosch came forward to donate blood.
- When the walk-in donors did not suffice then the staff of IGICH came forward to organise a camp within the hospital to ensure uninterrupted supply of blood to the patients.
- Rashtrotthana blood bank played a crucial role in ensuring that blood was available for the children when there were no units available at the IGICH blood bank.
In-spite of the fact that the atmosphere was tense and organising for blood exceptionally difficult, the supply of blood to the children went on uninterrupted. Read about the work done by Rakta Kranti here.