NATIONAL DAY FOR VOLUNTARY
BLOOD DONATION
Ø National
Blood Policy has been formulated and is now being implemented
with the mission to ensure easily accessible and adequate supply
of safe and quality blood collected from voluntary non-remunerated
regular blood donors.
Ø Presently,
there are 1771 licensed blood banks in the country. About 40%
of them are in the Government sector.
Ø Only a healthy
person between the age group of 18 – 60 weighing 45 kgs or more
with Haemoglobin content of 12.5 gms per 100cc or more can donate
blood.
Ø The Drugs
and Cosmetics Rule provides mandatory testing of blood for five
major infections viz. HIV, Hepatitis C, Syphilis & Malaria.
Every unit of blood is tested for all these infections.
Ø A complete
ban have been imposed on collection of blood from paid donors,
effective from 1st January, 1998. 45% blood is being
generated through voluntary donations and the rest are from replacement
donors.
Ø As per the
National Blood Safety Programme of NACO, it is mandatory on the
blood banks to test every unit of blood properly for grouping,
cross matching and testing for HIV, Syphilis, Hepatitis B &
C and Malaria before it is issued for transfusion. Facilities
have been provided by NACO to all the government and charitable
blood banks like Red Cross to carry out these tests. The test
results are noted on each blood bag.
Ø Whole human
blood can be separated into different components in blood banks
having these facilities. NACO has provided 82 such facilities
all over the country. Thus, one unit of blood can benefit 4 to
6 different patients.
Ø The blood
banks can only function if they are licensed by the Drug Inspectors
of the Food and Drug Administration of the respective states.
The Drugs & Cosmetics Act provides a legal framework under
which the blood banks are inspected and issue a proper license
which is renewed every alternate year. Every blood bank has to
prominently display their licenses for anyone to check.
Ø Blood that
is collected from a donor at no costs, requires to be processed
to make it free of infection, to ensure that it has certain minimum
quality standards, needs to be stored and it also needs to be
tested with recipient’s blood before transfusion. Besides all
these, establishment costs for the blood bank like infrastructure
maintenance, salaries etc. add to the overall costs of providing
a safe unit of blood to the patient. Blood banks attempt to recover
these costs as service charge from the consumer.
Ø There are
guidelines developed by the National Blood Transfusion Council
and circulated by NACO, on the amount of service charges that
can be realised by blood banks functioning in any sector in the
country.
Ø The estimated
demand of blood in the country as calculated on the basis of WHO
recommended norm of 7 units of blood per hospital bed per annum
works out to about 6 million units of blood. Presently, 6 million
units of blood are being generated in the country which should
be just enough provided there are no wasteful practices in blood
transfusion. With the advancement of technology and mushrooming
of superspeciality hospital in cities, the gap between demand
and supply is continuously widening. The demand therefore is always
on the increase.
