“Bulk transfer of blood between blood banks of all sectors permitted by NBTC” was published in the Volume 6 Issue 4 of Sankalp Patrika. The good news is that at least the State Government of Karnataka has accepted the guideline issues by NBTC in its totality in the Second Meeting of the Technical Expert Committee of KSBTC help on 11 March 2016. This is great news for the blood banks in the state. The onus of making use of this great policy change in order to improve access and access of blood across the state is now upon the blood banks and the storage centres.
In context of Karnataka, this guideline is exceptionally important because of the wide disparity between demand and supply across the state. For most months in the year, Bangalore has enough voluntary blood donors to take care of the requirement of blood in the city as well as to help bridge the shortage in the other districts of the state.
This guideline also makes the role of storage centres more meaningful as now each one of them can issue blood to whichever patient may need it. Earlier, the units of blood could be issued only for the patients taking treatment in hospital to which the storage centre was attached. This is exceptionally useful in remote hospitals which are located far away from the blood banks.
Now that the private hospital based blood banks and storage centres can get blood units transferred from other blood banks that have no shortage of voluntary blood donors, they should stop asking for replacement blood units. This guideline makes it more unreasonable for private hospitals to continue the undue harassment of patient families.
We congratulate KSBTC for the positive step and request all blood banks to make immediate use of this great policy change to ensure each patient get’s access to voluntarily donated blood on time, every time.
The copy of the minutes of the meeting are available on request. Please write to sankalp.admin@gmail.com.