August 2010: First anniversary of Disha Karnataka Helpline and Dengue..

Currently, according to the Annual plan of Sankalp, most of our working wings tend to relax and come out of the execution semester and gear up for the planning semester. But, this year, the situation is such that, execution is still on the highest priority leaving less time for planning.

The Emergency Wing:

Fight with Dengue is on and platelet requests are at all time high
The Emergency Wing of Sankalp have had their busiest month in Sankalp's history of taking up emergency blood requests. With Dengue cases not coming down, the pressure is on to help people search those crucial units of blood in order to save a person's life in an emergency. Right from suggesting smarter medical alternatives like single donor platelet apheresis to finding a donor or a unit in very little time to handling pressure of multiple requests from emotionally aggressive relatives and cracking blood requests for the rarest of the rare units, the team has done it all with a smile.

In the last week of August, the team received a whopping 92 requests for help in blood emergencies and every one of them were attended to with equal care and concern by the team. The Sankalp emergency wing is undergoing a test of the nerves and the volunteers are standing as a fitting reply to the dengue havoc, particularly in Bangalore.

Donor registration drives were organised in Raichure and Bellary
All this apart, the team has been working in close sync with the Rakta Kranti Karnataka team to add strength and numbers to the Karnataka wide database of blood donors. The team executed 2 donor registration drives after the events were scheduled by the RKK team. Government College in Raichur was the first. The number of registrations here were only 80 and not as per expected lines. However, there was another at Bellary Institute of Technology and Mangement where 410 students registered to be part of the database of emergency donors and respond to the call for help to save a life. These registration drives are giving the EW team much neded support and confidence to effectively handle blood requests in various districts of Karnataka.

Rakta Kranti Bangalore:

Usually in August Sankalp RKB team organizes lesser drives, owing to the fact that Independence Day in itself inspires many people to organise blood donation drives and there are many drives in the city. This time with Dengue on the prowl, the pressure on the team was still on. 2 blood donation drives were held in August. One with a company called MACH and another at Standard Chartered Bank. Unfortunately for the team 2 more, one at Reva College and the other at ST MicroElectronics got canceled due to administrative reasons. However, the team is upto the Dengue challenge again and a plethora of drives are in line for the month of September.

Rakta Kranti Karnataka:

The Rakta Kranti Karnataka events are looking to shape up. In sync with the EW donor registration drives in Raichur and Bellary were planned. Kolar, Mysore and Belgaum are the next in line. 3 blood donation drives, one in Davangere, one in Mysore and one in Kolar got canceled due to some unplanned incidents in colleges (A college trustee passed away in one, a principal had to attend another high level meeting in the other and a government minister came to the college in another). These will look to be lined up in September. Also, many other blood donation drives are being planned in September. The team has been working hard to fix blood donation drives for September and October and drives are expected in Belgaum, Mysore, Kolar, Davangere and Raichur. Team red trainings are also due in some places where camps are planned and they will be executed too.

Disha:

Although no new blood banks have been added into Disha in August, a lot of stabilization work is in progress to improve the quality of service (Network issues, redirecting cases to Sankalp EW, call center infrastructure etc are being looked into in seriousness to serve people who call up in a better way). Publicity of the helpline is being planned in other districts through the help of the Sankalp PR wing. Hospitals in Bangalore are being visited in a planned manner to put up stickers and posters everywhere. The number 9480044444 has been the life line for many this Dengue season fulfilling it's reason for existence! This Independence day, the State-wide helpline number completed one year of its service :)

Rakta Kranti Schools:

Come the new academic year, students are back in schools again and the Rakta Kranti schools volunteers are back again. Schools are being visited in a time bound manner and events are being planned in September. Now the programme has been tuned to a degree that one volunteer can take up end to end management of the entire event in any given school. In the coming months, the plan is to reach out to more students and open their eyes to blood donation.

Sankalp Tech:

Sankalp tech wing is slowly working towards providing cool solutions for the effective working of Sankalp. Search is made available for all users in sankalpindia.net. Every team of Sankalp has it's own internal working website (i.e. there is a website for Emergency wing, Rakta Kranti Karnataka, Rakta Kranti Schools, Rakta Kranti Bangalore and also a common Sankalp internal site). All these are drupal based. The tech wing is working to make each of these websites as a core working component of the team by providing important facilities and upgrades that are highly needed for that particular team by taking inputs from volunteers. Also in association with PR wing, the tech team is working to make sankalindia.net in itself a much better website to browse!

Public Relations:

The public relations wing of Sankalp is working towards making the website more readable and presentable. The website now is taking a new shape with articles related to blood in one cluster, ones related to disaster in another and so on to make browsing more pleasant. Also, a whole list of related artciles pops up on the side to help the reader get lost in a sea of related topics :). The team is also working to get newspapers outside Bangalore to publicise the Sankalp blood helpline number, 9480044444. Furthermore work is in progress to get an official Sankalp newspaper in print. Named as Sankalp Patrika, the newspaper will be a reality before the end of 2010.