Blood Mobile on the Way

Submitted by rajat on

NEW DELHI: Not being able to make it to a blood donation camp? Don't worry. A state-of-the-art blood collection bus could soon park at your doorstep.

With India facing a major shortage of voluntary donated blood -- to the tune of 2 million units a year -- the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) on Friday flagged off a `moving blood bank' in Delhi that will park and organise impromptu blood donation camps. Read More Mobile blood banks to make donation easy

This recent news from Times of India set my imagination on fire. It has been a log time dream of the very young hearts that beat for Sankalp to see a mobile blood bank for Bangalore. Now, if we trust this news report, a mobile vehicle is on it's way. However, at the very same time many questions come to my mind and I am in a state of unrest. The report says that the vehicle costs Rs 1.1 crore. Now that is a huge sum of money. going by our understanding of the costing of such vehicles, we beleive that if this amount of money has been spent then the vehicle will truely give a delightful and safe blood donation experience. However, the main concern we have as an organisation working for the cause of blood is the optimal utilisation of this vehicle. We have seen several blood banks in recent times resusing to come to blood donation drives simply because they do not want to ask their staff to go for multiple drives in a week. We have seen some other blood banks which are far from taking care of the blood requirement of their hospital, yet, reluctant to come for the drives. the question that comes to my mind is whether this vehicle will be made to stand in the premesis of one such blood bank of whether it will be fully utilised.

I want to quote the misuse of public funds as an example here. A reputed government blood bank purchased a machine for platelet apheresis at a time when the technology was just coming to the country. It must have been a very welcome move at that time and surely there must have been much fanfare after spending a couple of tens of lacs. In the years to come several other blood banks in the city purchased the machine. Apheresis is a common procedure now. However, the irony of the sitautaion is that the one of the first and the biggest blood bank in the state, the one which got the machine first has never ever used the machine for the process. Even a demonstartive process has not been done on the machine. What a sheer waste of public money and what a shame! On one hand we have several people citing lack of funds as the reason for poor quality of service in Government institutions and on the other hand moeny is being wasted so badly.

Coming back to the main topic - the blood mobile. A blood mobile can ideally cater to 2 (if not 3) blood donation camps in a day. This vehicle should never be used at places where a large number of donations are expected. It fills in for those organisation who want to conduct camps but who do not have sufficient space to organise it. These are typically camps where 20-100 units of blood are collected. One could easily organise 2 or more such drives daily. Assuming an optimistic number we could say that the vehicle can collect about 150 units a day. A vehicle will probably not tire out as easily as staff does, so typically one would expect it to run for at least 6 days a week. Keeping some government holidays and service days out, it is definitely possible to run the vehicle for 300 days in a year. That puts the total collection capacity of the vehicle to 45,000 units a year. This is almost 4 times the number of units any single govenment blood bank collects on an average. The point is clear. If this vehicle is attached to one single blood bank in the state, either the blood bank's capacity to collect, store, process and issue blood should be increased dramatically or the vehicle will be grossly underutilised.

A better possible solution would be to give access to all Government blood banks. They could put tgether a reservation policy and each of the blood banks could share the expensive resource. It will definitely take some amount of will power from the decision makers to implement such an arrangement. what remains to be seen is whether a real optimal utilisation policy will come or whether the ribbon will be cut without consideration to the utilisation.

I am very keen to see what actually comes and how. I have been very patently waiting to see the first blood mobile in Bangalore. I hope when it actually comes, it comes as a meaningful addon to blood banking in Karnataka.