The year also witnessed a significant amount of effort spent by the team to get the right balance of quality and number of drives in place.On the occasion of the dedicatory services of the “Bose Institute” the great Indian scientist Aacharya Jagadish Chandra Bose spoke the following:
For some regular voluntary blood donors, donating blood feels like doing a routine activity. For many of them, this is a responsibility that they duly fulfill. This story is about a blood donor who sets a true example of this unique category of people.
It's always a challenge to make available adequate quantity of rare blood groups. Whenever there is request for Bombay blood group, our emergency team explores all alternatives to blood transfusion before proceeding to organise for blood donations. The medical condition, the alternatives for transfusions which fit into the scenario and whether or not any alternative was used eventually is documented for each request. We recently analysed 40 of the Bombay blood group requests the organisation received last year.
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.
Despite being an institution of repute and a medical hub in the southern part of Bangalore city, their views towards voluntary blood donation are unfortunate.
When Sankalp got it's first request for platelet apheresis, little was known and understood about the procedure. We got the volunteers to donate platelets first and then gradually made progress towards educating the regular blood donors as well as building the country's first voluntary platelet database. The volunteers of the organisation spent good amount of time learning the use case and benefits of single donor platelets (SDP) in particular and apheresis technique in general.
NACO claims 80% voluntary blood donation already and aims at achieving 85% in 2014-15. Unfortunately, right under the government's nose, at an institution which government wants the nation to look up-to and learn from - the message of voluntary blood donations seems to have no takers.
The above card is one of the four such cards a patient presented to a voluntary organisation last week demanding that they be given blood since they had provided replacement blood earlier in the year.
Although several stories questioning if justice had been done to the victims of the worst industrial disaster in Bhopal on 3rd Dec 1984 keep coming up, it is unclear if people reporting these understand the real problems. Perhaps there is no accurate numbers on the magnitude of damage. Different sources quote different figures. Perhaps it's not the numbers that matter now, it's the fact that even today - 30 years later the ghost of the tragedy haunts the residents of the city - mentally, physically and financially.
