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.
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 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.
December was a busy month in anticipation of the winter shortage. In all 12 blood donation drives were organized in December collecting 1223 units or blood. Let’s have a look at each camp.
In the month of November 2014 Sankalp India Foundation organised 11 blood donation camps where 976 individuals came forward to donate blood and 775 units of blood were collected. The month of November traditionally has several large blood donation camps in the city. We timed the blood donation drives to take care of the small pockets of shortage. Sankalp salutes the spirit of voluntary blood donation at the technology hub of Bangalore.
The following are the highlights of the activities at the Thalassemia Prevention, Management and Cure Program of Sankalp India Foundation for the month of August.
After the busy summer months of organising a huge number of camps, Sankalp slowed down the pace in August. During the month of August, plenty of organisations plan for blood donation drives due to Independence Day. Degree colleges would also have started classes and many of them plan for drives.
Let us see what May had in store for us at Sankalp.
16 camps were organized in the month of June collecting 1171 units of blood.
Let us see what May had in store for us at Sankalp.
In February and March we promised to work towards fighting blood shortage in summers. Months of preparation and hard work indeed led to a shortage less summer so far. It was a new record for Sankalp when we collected total of 2630 units in 24 camps in the month of May.
Emergency wing was the first team of SIF which started with the pledge to do whatever it takes to ensure no one suffers due to shortage of blood. Today the team takes up blood requests which are difficult to be handled by the existing blood stocks in blood banks or by simply getting a few donation done. The team takes up blood requests for extremely rare blood group, when there is a requirement of unusual blood products, when there is a danger to the life of the person because of lack of availability of blood and other corner cases of blood banking.
The 10th anniversary of Sankalp India Foundation presented the organisation with the opportunity to review the work done through the past years and formulate the strategy for the decade to come. The pedagogic approach taken through the years to unveil the intricacies of the tasks we took at hand and to build strong solutions presented the organisation led to the challenge to scale up the work and reach out further in the pursuit of the goals. It took only a few weeks of intense discussions, planning and strategizing and the teams were back to work.
Let us see what April had in store for us at Sankalp.
There were 10 blood donation camps organized by the team in the month of April. A total of 1061 units were collected in the events.
Sankalp India Foundation has been running the state-wide helpline for blood since 2006. Any person looking for blood in Karnataka needs to call just a single number 9480044444 to get the blood availability information in the city. On enquiring the person is provided the blood bank's name, number of units available, the address and the contact number.
Let us see what January had in store for us at Sankalp.
With most of the request getting handled at the Disha helpline, the emergency team handled 26 emergency requests this month out of which 14 were for negative groups. Interestingly, more half of these requests were from outside Bangalore.
