Donations needed amid national blood shortage
There is a severe blood shortage currently affecting the country.
Blood shortages can happen often frequently due to multiple factors such as bad weather conditions, natural disasters such as hurricanes and an overall lack of donors in general.
According to Christy Peters, the external communications manager for the American Red Cross in Cleveland, very few people are candidates to donate blood and an even fewer amount actually donate.
“Approximately 30% of the population is eligible to donate,so it’s actually a smaller number of people that can donate blood, of those 30% less five actually do on a regular basis.” Peters explains.
For this reason, Peters says that they run about 20 blood drives a day during the weekdays and 10 on the weekend days.
“Every single day we need to collect about 500 units of blood.”
External Communications Manager for the American Red Cross in Cleveland
According the American Red Cross website almost 7 million people in the United States donate blood.
With blood drives occurring so frequently and a lot of people donating it would seem that there is plenty of blood coming in. However, that is a common misconception many who do not donate have.
Each blood drive sets a goal for how much blood they wish to collect, some hit this goal while other drives do not, but that fluctuation and uncertainty is one of the ways shortages arise. (Any organization can apply to host a blood drive in any community across the nation.)
For example, the American Red Cross will ship out some of the blood they collect in the wake of natural disasters like we had this year with Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael but shipping out that blood could end up leaving them short for what they still need to provide to local hospitals.
The branch that Peters is a part of serves a large portion of northern Ohio and covers 19 counties and supply blood to over 50 hospitals.
Many of the patients at hospitals need blood transfusions for things like cancer treatment, emergencies such as car accidents, or others who may be going through surgery.
Any organization can apply to host a blood drive at the American Red Cross website.
Finding donors is one of the biggest challenge’s organizations like the American Red Cross and with so few eligible to even give blood it gets even more difficult.
One of the ways that people tend to donate is through personal experiences or knowing someone, a friend of family member, who needs blood.
While this is true in many cases Judge Dan Polster, who had just finished donating, explains one of the reasons he enjoys giving blood.
“Most things that you can do to save someone’s life you have to put yourself at great risk, great danger, here you just sit there and read a book.”
Donating blood is a common practice and there are many misconceptions that people have about it that Peters says they are trying to educate people on so that they can gain more donors.
Many individuals who do donate do so more than once a year and they have a lot of repeat donors (you are able to donate once every 56 days)but getting those new donors is where they struggle.
Peters explained how simple it could be to prevent shortages.
She says, “If every person who only gave once a year would give twice a year it would go a long way in ending the urgent needs and shortages that we see.”
