While most people have received such SOS messages many times, soon such distress situations might not arise at all.
‘Please please forward this message to all your friends; a baby needs AB+ Blood immediately. Contact XYZ hospital to save a life’.
A frantic call for help?
While most people have received such SOS messages many times, soon such distress situations might not arise at all. The next time someone is faced with a medical emergency, help might just be an SMS away.
The State Blood Transfusion Council (SBTC) is soon to start a new project, ‘SMS and Hemovigilance System’, to link all public, private blood banks across the state and make information on blood stock available at these banks available within seconds to general public. Dr Girish Chaudhary, assistant director, SBTC, said that the new system being developed is not available across the country and is only used by a few countries abroad.
“The hemovigilance system will help us to do minute audit of every recognised blood bank in state. The moment someone will donate blood, the bag will get marked with a barcode which will give us complete details about city, blood bank and even donor information,” said Dr Chaudhary.
“A software will be given to all blood banks; the moment the bag is received, the records will be uplinked to our main server. From then on, we will get all details like who received the bag where and even minute things like temperature of blood bag,” said Dr Chaudhary.
Since the software will automatically update records of stock at blood banks, it will be easier to provide that information to the public.
“Under the new system we are trying to get a dedicated SMS number. If someone requires blood, they send a text message to that number with blood group and city. We send them a list of blood banks nearby that have stock. If not in that city, we send them information about nearby centres. This helps save crucial time in emergencies,” added Dr Chaudhary.
A couple of years ago, SBTC had launched a similar feature on its website, www.mahasbtc.com, wherein each blood bank in the state had to update their stock on a daily basis. In fact the website offers an option — Find Blood — which asks people to fill in details like district, blood group, etc., and claims to give details of blood stock.
However, many private blood banks do not update their stock making this feature ineffective. Chaudhary said there are many hurdles to this which has now prompted SBTC to think of SMS-based service.
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