Blood Donors and the Supply of Blood and Blood Products (1996) / Chapter Skim
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II Enhancing Collections
II Enhancing Collections
Pages 31-50
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From page 31... ...
II Enhancing Collections 31
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From page 33... ...
We also have the lowest processing fees in our area of the country, and the savings to those hospitals in terms of lower fees, reliable supplies, and the elimination of cancelled surgeries for lack of blood have been enormous. All of this has been accomplished through our membership blood assurance plan, the Delaware Plan.
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From page 34... ...
The key to our success is the support of businesses and organizations. As I mentioned earlier, we do not conduct community blood drives and we don't ask businesses to sponsor blood drives.
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From page 35... ...
It is based on individual responsibility. This is an extremely equitable system in that every person is asked to play a small role in ensuring the community's blood supply We spread that responsibility over a larger base than is common among most blood programs.
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From page 36... ...
The difference in the incidence rate among the replacement donors compared to that among allogeneic donors was not found to be statistically significant. The study did show that replacement donors were more likely to be giving blood for the first time, 18.5 percent, and their test marker rates were similar to those of other first-time donors.
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From page 37... ...
To summarize, for over 30 years, the Delaware Plan has eliminated blood shortages, eliminated surgeries cancelled for lack of blood, and eliminated emergency media appeals for blood donors. Hospitals in our system set their own optimal inventory levels for blood.
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From page 38... ...
It is more in the line of altruism, although our platelet apheresis donors do receive two credits when they make donations. We generally just recruit them by mail from among our regular blood donors or recruit them in the chair as they are giving their allogeneic unit of blood.
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From page 39... ...
David Bonk: The question comes up periodically, but the system works extremely well at recruiting blood donors and maintaining one thing that we absolutely need, enough blood on the shelves every day of the year. You saw the fluctuations in some of the presentations made earlier, the highs and the lows.
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From page 41... ...
Certainly not to the extent that we should prohibit, prevent, or discourage people from selling it. Beyond that, if any sacrifice to the health of innocents is entailed by our insistence on somehow keeping this a donative procedure rather than paying people, then it is truly bizarrely immoral; that is to say, if we are condemning people to mortality and morbidity, there is certainly nothing moral in doing that on the altar of encouraging the great charitable, altruistic act of donation.
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From page 42... ...
Precisely because you don't pay people in cash you frequently must compensate them in a more inefficient manner if you are going to compensate and encourage them at all. Another notion is that if you collect through blood drives at work, you are taking away time from work.
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From page 43... ...
From that perspective, again, we would be paying people for blood and paying more for blood the second and third times that they give, when we are more secure that their blood is safe and healthy. With regard to finding ways to solve the problem of monitoring blood, much of the problem would have been corrected by making blood suppliers strictly liable for any problems with their blood.
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From page 44... ...
I believe, though, that the safety of our current blood supply is not a function of all of these intrusive prescreening questionnaires that people have come up with, but rather a function of the fact that we can now effectively test for the various forms of hepatitis and HIV. With regard to the letter fiom the old man that Dr.
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From page 45... ...
They were really talking about the American Association of Blood Banks versus the Red Cross and were just beginning to recognize blood supply problems that could not be blamed on the public. I was among the early people to contend that much was right with the American blood supply.
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From page 46... ...
We also studied work environments that made it astoundingly easy and routine to be a blood donor, places where you couldn't avoid thinking about blood donation. For this, we went to the big insurance companies in Connecticut, where the odds were that somebody known to an employee would call four times a year to solicit a blood donation.
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From page 47... ...
Asking for blood donation reasons can achieve strange results. There was a person at a blood bank who gave blood frenetically, four times a year, maybe five when the number of weeks worked out right.
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From page 48... ...
A lot of the ads emphasize that there is a tiny segment of the population something like 3.5 percent that gives blood, so why don't you be as heroic as they. There was one campaign with a picture of President Jimmy Carter lying on a table giving his 58th unit of blood.
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From page 49... ...
I saw our blood drive at MIT, which was about the national leader or close to it in per capita units, become just another blood drive when the Red Cross chapter around it collapsed, the chapter having sustained, fed, and paid attention to the students who organized the drive as well as to the donors. I think any system is going to require getting a bunch of blood from young, healthy people and giving it to mostly older people who need blood.
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