It was around July last year when we decided to put laziness behind and initiate the Sunday get-together for Thalassemia. There was a situation where several parents wanted to meet us and have discussions about various issues faced by their children. We earmarked Sunday as a day for all those meetings with the parents, exploring the strategies to improve the management of the disorder as well as take small steps in direction of the cure.
When Sankalp got it's first request for platelet apheresis, little was known and understood about the procedure. We got the volunteers to donate platelets first and then gradually made progress towards educating the regular blood donors as well as building the country's first voluntary platelet database. The volunteers of the organisation spent good amount of time learning the use case and benefits of single donor platelets (SDP) in particular and apheresis technique in general.
In the month of November 2014 Sankalp India Foundation organised 11 blood donation camps where 976 individuals came forward to donate blood and 775 units of blood were collected. The month of November traditionally has several large blood donation camps in the city. We timed the blood donation drives to take care of the small pockets of shortage. Sankalp salutes the spirit of voluntary blood donation at the technology hub of Bangalore.
NACO claims 80% voluntary blood donation already and aims at achieving 85% in 2014-15. Unfortunately, right under the government's nose, at an institution which government wants the nation to look up-to and learn from - the message of voluntary blood donations seems to have no takers.
The above card is one of the four such cards a patient presented to a voluntary organisation last week demanding that they be given blood since they had provided replacement blood earlier in the year.
Sankalp India Foundation has an Emergency Team which works to ensure that people who do not find blood from the blood banks are helped. The team works on corner cases of blood transfusion medicine and extremely rare blood group requests. The team has been handling BBG requests for last 6 years.
Although several stories questioning if justice had been done to the victims of the worst industrial disaster in Bhopal on 3rd Dec 1984 keep coming up, it is unclear if people reporting these understand the real problems. Perhaps there is no accurate numbers on the magnitude of damage. Different sources quote different figures. Perhaps it's not the numbers that matter now, it's the fact that even today - 30 years later the ghost of the tragedy haunts the residents of the city - mentally, physically and financially.
