Rakta Kranti
With the onset of the new financial year, Sankalp Rakta Kranti Team looked to make a strong start with plenty of blood drives catering to the summer period. On the back of a year with close to 12,000 units collection having gone by, the team wanted to maintain the same momentum. In summary, 1055 units were collected in 13 drives. We had about 3% of donors having post donation complications and the percentage of deferrals for the month was 22.3.
It all started well with a good drive on 1 April at General Motors, who stood true to their commitment to support voluntary blood donation for the 5th year running. As is the case every year, the support from the Sports Committee was excellent. Donor motivation was high and the turnout was amazing. 335 donors turned up to donate blood. 290 units were collected by blood bank teams from NIMHANS and Rashtrotthana. The management team at GM were thrilled with the success and promised to work towards making this a core activity in their calendar year.
Sankalp empanelled 2 new organisations in April : Herman Miller and Mphasis. At Herman Miller, the team was highly motivated to have a successful event and adopted strong publicity measures in their entire building and neighbouring malls. Their efforts paid off as more than 100 donors walked in. 83 units were collected by the team at Sanjay Gandhi Hospital. Mphasis has multiple locations across Bangalore. 5 best ones were chosen and drives were organized in all of them. Although at a couple of locations timings could have been better managed and planned by Sankalp, overall the drives were fine and 287 units were collected in these 5 drives. Victoria, Bowring and Rashtrotthana blood banks were the beneficiaries.
Other regular supportive organizations like Robert Bosch (100 units at their electronic city facility), JNCASR (56 units), Citrus Hotel (20 units), Rambus (92 units), Microland (41 units at their electronic city facility), Alcon Laboratories (a unit of Novartis with 77 units) also supported the cause of voluntary blood donation. All of them supported the blood bank teams really well for requirements and there was a regular influx of donors. With posters, mailers, announcements and floor talks, the publicity in all of them was good. Government blood bank teams from Victoria, Bowring and NIMHANS shared the units.
Sankalp thanks all these organizations for their whole hearted support.
Thalassemia Management and Care
At Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health Thalassema Day Care centre we had 217 patient visits in April with a total of 307 transfusions. More than 90% blood units were made available from the attached blood bank, though only two-third units were less than 7 days past collection. The average time for blood processing was 2 hours and the median hospitalization was 7.8 hours.
Samraksha has 185 patient visits with 228 blood units transfused. All units of blood were made available in-house. The median difference is the collection and issue date was just 3 days and the time to process blood components by blood bank was 2 hours. The median hospitalisation was 7 hours. Samraksha is also in the process of comprehensive identification of complications. Starting June, one specialty at a time, interventions will be made available in a structured manner for the children taking treatment.
Thal Report Card the new automated quality management system measures the efficiency with which the centre runs on a weekly basis and this makes sure that the management is completely informed about the issues the centre is facing and is able to initiate timely corrective action.
Significant progress is being made in bringing the ferritin of children in control. The mammoth task of reigning in the high ferritin levels is slow and time taking. However, we have moved on from struggling with access to sufficient chelation. We have starting using T2* MRI for children who have unexpected ferritin values and this exercise is giving good outcome.
Disha
Disha, the blood helpline is beginning to buzz more and more - announcing the summers and corroborating the fact that there is summer shortage of blood. An unusually high number of blood requests for regular blood groups indicates the shelves are running dry not just in Bangalore but across the state. Number of blood requests in April were almost twice as much as in March though the demand for platelets was very limited.
Emergency Wing
There were fewer Bombay blood group requests in the month of April. The emergency team used the opportunity to update the analytical data from the open requests from past months and come to conclusions. Normally, when there is a period of calm when it comes to request for rare blood groups, it get's followed with a large number of blood requests all at once. The emergency team spent the month preparing to handle a surge of blood requests not only of rare blood groups but also SDP and requests from places where the blood banking support is weaker.
We are happy to share that our paper “Managing Rare Blood Group Requests- Bombay Oh Phenotype: Our Experience with www.bombaybloodgroup.org” has been accepted for publication in ‘Blood Transfusion’ - an international journal from the field of transfusion medicine which has an impact factor of 1.9. The publication of our findings and experiences in prestigious open-access scientific journals is very encouraging. We have learnt the intricacies of blood transfusion medicine from various aspects because some other people chose to share their work. It will take some more time before the work is published.