It was a big decision - should I give up or carry on.
Due to illness, where I needed antibiotics, I could not donate a pint of blood for over a year. However, feeling fit and no signs of the illness returning it was time to get back to regular blood donations. I booked in to my nearest donation centre and was getting ready to attend. But close to the day the session was cancelled and although the NHS Give Bloodkindly booked me into a session the following week I couldn’t attend due to other commitments. So I reached for my trusty NHS Give Blood mobile app to rebook a session. But the next local session was towards the end of the year. Not deterred I searched wider but found that they were either full or were being reorganised. I eventually found a drop-in centre in a major city but that would have required about a couple of hours traveling and probably a long wait. I was feeling frustrated. I wanted to donate a pint of blood but it was proving to be a major logistics exercise and I started to wonder if it really was worth the effort. But the words “A pint of blood can save a life” found me walking into a north Shropshire Town Council offices to give blood.
The first pint of blood that I donated started where most of my adventures start - around the bar ( in this case in the Students Union ). There had been posters everywhere about the forthcoming visit of a Blood Donation Unit to my college, and over a pint of beer a friend asked if I was going to donate a pint. Thoughts of Tony Hancock’s The Blood Donor “… a pint! That’s very nearly an armful!” brought forward a number of excuses ranging from I felt a cold coming on to I needed to complete a project to meet a deadline ( the reality was that up to that point in my life I had very few things stuck in me never mind taking anything out and therefore I was frightened ). But my friend persisted and I successfully gave my first pint of blood over 40 years ago and have been giving every since.
The experience of donating blood has changed a lot from my first pint when we used to lay down on what appeared to be camp beds to now when state of the art ergonomic chair-beds are used to rotate us into position with relative ease. However one thing remains constant which is a drink and an excellent selection of biscuits after the donation. ( if you are interested in the history of blood transfusion then The History of Blood Transfusion is a quick read). Also, the mobile app is amongst the best because it is very easy to use.
Following the trouble I was having donating blood I dug a bit deeper into blood donation in the UK. I was surprised to find that there are only about 3% ( or 1.3m ) registered blood donors in England with the numbers dropping due to a range of reasons. To address the problem of falling donation volunteers and bring down costs to help with the NHS costs NHS Give Blood have produced an Blood 2020 A strategy for the blood supply in England and North Wales which outlines many positive initiatives.
Sitting waiting to donate blood I wondered what can be done to help increase the number of volunteers ( and therefore increase the number of donation sessions ) and came up with a few thoughts:
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Raise the profile of donating blood using celebrity endorsement ( I can never forget Vinnie Jones Hands Only CPR video ). Imagine Gary Barlow endorsing blood donations to his millions of fans or Peter Kay singing on video about the importance of donating blood. How about an Olympian jogging into a sessions around the country ?
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We are in an era where everything seems to be ‘pop-up’. There are pop-up shops, restaurants, gigs and so on. Why not pop-up blood donations say in a University, shopping centre or large company. The mobile app ( or the desktop version ) could be developed so that interest in attending a pop-up session could be registered and when there are enough volunteers then a pop-up session could be organised.
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“Follow the blood” - show how the blood donated helps people in their battle against illness. There is already @GiveBloodNHS on twitter where both people donating and receiving blood exchange stories which I find very up lifting. Also, NHS Give Blood send a message a few days after a donation about where your blood has been issued. All of these are excellent ways to keep volunteers involved and should be promoted further to get greater involvement in donating blood.
I am sure that there are many more ideas that can be developed to help people donate more blood.
As for my next donation - having used the mobile app to book a session at a different location than my normal one I will be using it again to lead me to new parts of the country - yes - I could be coming to a donation session near you !
Following the publication of this post the NHS Blood and Transplant very kindly responded to the issues that I raised, in summary:
NHS Blood and Transplant have made changes to their sessions and the times due to improvements in clinical practice and to ensure that blood is used appropriately within hospitals which means that blood use has fallen. This is a trend they are seeing globally. It’s important that they respond to this by collecting the right type of blood, in the right quantities at the right time as efficiently as they can.
Many donors now choose to book from one session to the next. As a result of this, a large percentage of appointments do get booked up in advance. On the one hand this is a good thing for NHS Blood and Transplant because it helps to ensure they are going to achieve the collection target for the sessions that they run and meet the demand of hospitals nationally. However, this can make booking an appointment more difficult as in effect it reduces the number of appointments that are available to book close to the session date. Also, they always need to ensure we collect enough blood for patients, we also have a duty to ensure that we do not collect too much blood at any one time. Blood has a limited shelf life of just 35 days, so if they collect too much in a short period of time, they would be unable to use it all.
In the past NHS Blood have attempted to hold blood sessions at shopping centres but unfortunately it’s rare to get the green light from the venues due to the risk of the public being exposed to blood. However they often hold large scale recruitments events at universities and shopping centres across the country to register new donors. A recent example of this would be at the Arndale Centre in Manchester where they held an Organ Donation event that included a life size game of Operation. The event generated a great buzz around the centre and resulted in them recruiting 265 new organ donors in one day. A great success for NHS Blood and Transplant.
NHS Blood and Transplant do have celebrity support and they continue to try and work with celebrities, especially those who are blood donors and whose lives have been contributed by blood donations. Celebrity supporters have included: Gary Lineker, Jayne Torvill, Jovian Wade, Rachel Riley, Sarah Beeny, Graham Bell, Greg James Twin B and Amanda Holding However they have discovered that donors are more motivated by the experiences of ordinary people, for example family members or just regular people in the news who they better relate to, so they try and work with them more than celebrities to emphasise how blood donation saves lives.