PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa health department is focusing on students to collect more and more blood on voluntarily basis for provision to critical patients and those needing major surgeries in government hospitals, officials say.

According to them, a lack of voluntary blood donation due to poor public awareness is a main issue faced by the department.

The officials told Dawn that two regional blood banks, which became operational in Abbottabad and Dera Ismail Khan last month, didn’t receive donations of the desired level.

They said the health department was holding blood donation camps in colleges, universities and health-related educational institutions in a bid to improve blood supply.

The officials said a blood donation camp was organised in a 500-strong factory located in a village 20km from Dera Ismail Khan city but collected seven blood bags only.

Officials say hospitals using donated blood for critical cases, major surgeries

When contacted, Safe Blood Transfusion, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, project director Dr Shams Afridi said letters were being written to educational institutions in Abbottabad and DI Khan for camps to get more and more blood donations in view of the increasing need.

“Our slogan’one bag saves three lives’ is meant to sensitise the people to the significance of donating blood,” he told Dawn.

Dr Afridi said events were planned for every department of the Gomal University, Dera Ismail Khan,for one week for better donations through awareness.

He said motivation and health education officers had been engaged to persuade students to donate blood.

“In Abbottabad, we need more and more blood bags due to the Ayub Teaching Hospital and women and children’s hospitals, where critically-ill and injured people are brought for treatment,” he said.

Meanwhile, officials said the health department was dissatisfied with the lacklustre attitude of the people regarding blood donation and therefore, it was outsourcing two RBCs, one in Peshawar and the other in Swat, to ensure free services for patients.

They said both the centres were established 18 months and four years ago, respectively, but they failed to speed up donations as only students or relatives of patients donated blood in exchange of the blood of the required blood.

The officials said in 2020, the Peshawar RBC collected 48,003 blood bags from donors and 43,049 (89.68 per cent) of them came from the relatives of patients and just 4,954 (10.32 per cent) from volunteers.

They said the people, including those with formal education, had the misconception that blood donation caused physical weakness and diseases though the medical science had showed that healthy people could donate blood every three months. The officials said every donor was screened before blood was collected from him or her.

They said the main idea behind the outsourcing of RBCs was to mobilise people for blood donation to cater to the needs of thalassaemia-affected children and the people admitted to hospitals.

The officials said currently, the hospitals relied on family members of the admitted patients, who had no option but to donate own blood to save the life of their relatives.

They said the trend of voluntary blood donation was very low, especially among women, who had just 1.70 per cent (820 blood bags) of the total donations.

The officials said according to a national policy, at least five per cent of the blood donors should be women for which a sustained public awareness campaign was required and if that didn’t happen, patients would continue to die for want of blood.

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2022