Sankalp India Foundation has is an organization with a volunteer base of 25-30 people. Every year some of them move out based on life’s other priorities and new ones come in. These new volunteers are mainly the ones who are in their first year of professional courses. This year too there were 6-8 new volunteers who joined in.
Being a volunteer in a blood donor organization requires volunteers to understand blood and blood emergencies. Started on 23 May 2003 , the emergency wing has taken thousands of blood request so far and each time it handles a blood request it ensures that safe blood reaches the patient on time. The experience and learnings of the past 7-8 years are passed on to newcomers through detailed training sessions.
In these trainings, all the technical aspects regarding blood are not just explained through talks but also through live demonstrations in the blood banks. Important concepts are explained through different activities so that they learn better and have a good understanding. They are taken to blood banks where they are shown the ideal blood donation , at the same time they are taken through situations where all conditions may not be ideal for blood donation, so that they have a proper understanding of the real world outside. Not just the blood banks but the new volunteers are also made to
Visit hospitals to ensure that they learn how difficult it may for the patient side to search for a unit of blood.
Initially all the new volunteers work along with experienced volunteers and learn the mechanism of searching blood and donors when required. Frequent quizzes and tests are conducted to check the awareness among the volunteers.
To ensure the preparedness of new volunteers to handle emergency blood requests, they are given dummy cases depending upon which the gaps and short comings are analyzed and addressed. The Sankalp Emergency team has a very strong documentation and information gathering policy where all volunteers post their learnings. Hence necessary inputs are available with everyone the next time they handle a blood request. After these sessions the number of blood search experts @ Sankalp just goes up!