February 2015, Vol 5, Issue 2

Rakta Kranti

After the seasonal break around the Christmas - New Year period we had 9 camps in Jan collecting 751 units of blood in the month of January. Let us have a look at the drives from January.

Xerox

Xerox organized the first camp with Sankalp on 9th Jan. 65 units were collected in the camp. Excellent publicity from company and their cooperation in keeping the drive open for other companies, enabled a great turnout. In fact, due to high turnout post lunch, we had to close registrations early.

The following are some recommendations which we believe will help in reducing events of non-compliance in blood donation camps.

Regular blood donors are the cornerstone of blood safety and voluntary blood donation. The retention of blood donors is directly related with the experience they have when they come to donate blood. Quality, safety and donor retention are inseparable. Continuous focus on quality and safety is an essential responsibility of every organisation which is involved in the process of voluntary blood donation.

Association of Voluntary Blood Donors, West Bengal (AVBDWB) organised National Meet on Total Voluntary Blood Programme - Vision 2020 from 23-25th January, 2015 at Kolkata. This is one meet which is looked forward to by voluntary organisation from all over the country. Sankalp India Foundation participated in this meet for the first time and was also invited to share speak on the topic of management of rare blood groups.

Yesterday a family came to seek help for their child who is detected with thalassemia. We meet parents only on Sundays but we made an exception for this family as they had come all the way from a place 600 km away. The 8 month old baby girl had already received 3 transfusions and the family wanted to discuss the prospects of transplants. They had already visited 3 of the very popular BMT centres in the country and taken opinion. Unfortunately though the child had a sibling, his HLA type did not match.