Emergency Wing
With the rainy season, though the blood donation drives in the city started picking pace, the emergency team of the organisation had several sleepless nights. The rains brought with them mosquitoes and consequently viral fevers including the most dreaded one - dengue. A different trend orserved by the team this year was the sharp increase in the demand of single donor platelets. At times even with a resonably safe platlet count of 40,000+, there seemed to be panic for platelets. Some patients were told to organise 2 units of SDP all at once - a medically unconvincing requirement.
This month 47 emergency requests were reported out of which 22 were for platelets itself. The requirement for negative groups have shown a sharp peak this month as we attended at least 25 such requests needing negative groups.
Incredibly we managed 11 request for Bombay Blood Group , the highest in a month so far with call coming from all parts of India from Gujarat to Kerala .
We have managed to help the needy only with the constant help of the blood donors who are real our real heroes. On behalf of the entire Sankalp family the emergency team would like to thank each and every blood donor for their constant help and support.
Rakta Kranti
As the requirement for blood, in particular platelets were still high during the month, a total of 12 blood donation drives were organised in July 2013 in Bangalore leading to a collection of 924 units of blood. Most of these drives were repeat drives where organisations agreed for drives within few days of request.
1. FiberLink: 2nd July 2013. Second blood donation drive. 41 units collected. Very enthusiastic support from company.
2. WNS: 4th July 2013. Third blood donation drive. 95 units collected. Great spirit shown by donors to donate blood in 3 months after the previous drive.
3. Bethel Church: 7th July 2013. Second drive organised by the Church during Sunday prayer. 23 people including few members from general public donated blood.
4. JNCASR: 8th July 2013 6th Sankalp drive here. 39 units of blood were collected. Despite summer internship ending wherein students are busy, they came in to donate.
5. KPIT: 9th July 2013 5th blood donation drive here. 122 units collected. Despite a lot of hardships in accessing venue due to some internal construction within company, more than 150 enthusiastic donors turned up.
6. Xentrix: 10th July 2013. 3rd blood donation drive. Most of the donors were ones who did not get a chance to donate in an earlier drive 15 days back. Great spirit by the company associates to keep coming in to donate blood in huge numbers, despite the lmited space.
7. AltiSoure: A series of blood donation drives @ all locations of Altisource on 12 July 2013 was a big success. Excellent support from the company ensured that there were just no hassles despite this being the first time that they are organising a drive. More than 300 donors walked in (in all 3 locations combined). Finally, 252 units of blood were collected with 152 @ Electronic City campus, 58 @ VTV Bellandur campus and 42 @ Salarpuria Arena, Koramangala campus. The company was really happy with this turnout and has promised to support Sankalp with blood donation drives regularly
8. General Motors: 284 life savers come forward to donate blood and 245 units were collected at the blood donation drive organised at General Motors at ITPL on 17th July 2013. It was a very well organised drive and the enthusiastic volunteer team from the organisation did a great job. One of the donors commented - "Well organised. No hassles. Polite and courteous staff. Very caring."
9. Hilti: A small organisation showed lot of interest in organising a blood donation drive to suport voluntary blood donation. Although they had less than 25 members in office, 19 people turned up and 16 donated blood.
10. Airtel: 6th Blood donation drive here. With great publicity and the right message being sent out to donors, more than 75 people turned up to donate blood. Finally 59 units were collected
We would like to thank all the donors and volunteers from organisations who made it possible to organise all these camps. You are the real heroes!
Apart from this, efforts are on to work with colleges in Hubli-Dharwad, Gulbarga and Belgaum regions. Small industries in Dharwad are also being spoken to for camps with support from Dr Gajanan from Tata Motors.
Disha
The helpline received an average of 35 calls daily, most of which are platelet requests, both SDP and RDP. The team has been become more frequent and streamlined with quality check process and feedback process of calls which come to the helpline. We are calling back some of the people who had called the helpline and received help. This is helping the team to find gaps which need to be filled and ways in which processes can be improved. This month, we successfully completed feedback calls for June and July callers.
We are also in the process of integrating SMS gateway to the helpline. Sample SMSes were sent to some selected callers and called back to find out if the service was of any help. One a decision is arrived at, callers to the helpline will receive blood bank contact details along with other necessary instructions via SMS along with verbal assistance. We have also identified some more blood banks in Bangalore which we want to be a part of the helpline network. Visiting these blood banks and their eventual integration will be taken up in the month of August.
Thalassemia Day Care
The Thalassemia Day Care program had smooth sailing in the month of July. Blood arrangement was not a problem in-spite of the shortage in the city. 3 units of Bombay blood group for one of our patient were organised. Thanks to KMC Manipal, we got one unit of blood transported overnight from Udupi. One unit was donated by Mr Satish from Chikballapur and the other by Mr Mahesh from Bangalore. A big salute to these life savers. This apart, several young enthusiastic donors from Christ college donated blood to ensure free supply of platelets to one of the patients suffering from aplastic anemia.
A strong need is being felt to outsource some of the essential medical tests. This would lead to an additional expense of about Rs. 10,000/- each month. The chronic shortage of some medicines also needs to be looked into. The large number of children who are coming to the day care is pushing the resources that had been planned for the unit to the limits.
Sankalp has also placed a technician at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health Blood Bank on the request of the institute. The technician is making it possible to ensure that children get blood on time. The children are happy that they get blood by lunch and by 5:00 PM, all of them are on the way back home.
A large number of parents are asking for HLA screening. If there is a fully matched sibling (who is not suffering from thalassemia), stem cells transplantation can completely cure the child. The dilemma that we are facing is that the four families which already have matched siblings have not started the process of transplant yet. In such a scenario the emphasis is on enabling the process of transplant for these four families first before taking up the expensive screening process for more families. Currently Sankalp India Foundation is closely working with Cure2Children and South East Asia Institute of Thalassemia, Jaipur to step down the iron levels in the children eligible for BMT and then enable transplantation to them.
The software backplane has been at the heart of systematic management of the disorder. In July there was a major software upgrade which has brought in whole new set of features into the application.
With the new Day Care Centre set to be inaugurated at Rastrotthana Blood Bank on the 21st of this month, the month of August is expected to be action packed at the thalassemia front for the organisation.
Sankalp Tech
In the month of July, improvements were made in the Bombay Blood Group site. It was made more user friendly and new features were added. An Employee Management System was brought in place for better management of the staff working for Sankalp on an employment basis. Additionally, some next generation features in were integrated into the Thalassemia Site, which includes Interactive Graphs and Mobile Apps. The site was made mobile friendly, with advanced patient status indicators. More work on this is still going on.
The performance of many Sankalp sites were improved for faster access. With usage of better reporting mechanisms in Sankalp Servers for Performance monitoring, we plan to enhance the sites' performance further.
Improvements in Disha Call Center Site were brought in place. It also included integration of SMS Gateway. Now, callers can get details of Blood Banks via SMS.