Your loved one is in urgent need of a surgery. The hospital asks you for replacement blood. If it’s a rare blood group, the search for a donor could leave you sapped.
Just walk into the bank, opening at JJ Hospital in Nov, and buy it real cheap
Your loved one is in urgent need of a surgery. The hospital asks you for replacement blood. If it’s a rare blood group, the search for a donor could leave you sapped.
Relax. This ordeal may soon be over, forever. Come November, the first-of-its kind community blood centre, to be inaugurated at JJ Hospital, is expected to make things better. The state-run centre will facilitate the availability of blood and its components, round-the-clock, for nominal charges. Pouches of blood will come bar coded to rule out chances of contamination and human error.
“The USP of this community bank is its zero-replacement policy,” said Dr Sanjay Jadhav, assistant director of State Blood Transfusion Council. “Relatives of patients undergoing surgery can just walk in and purchase the blood they need.”
Someone like Mrinal Madnani, who lost her husband, Roshan, in an accident on the Mumbai-Pune highway two years ago, would wish that such centres had been there much before. When Roshan was fighting for life in Navi Mumbai’s Anuradha Nursing Home, Mrinal was away, trying to find replacement for B+ group - usually very common.
“The nursing home had exhausted its stock and I was asked to scout for replacement blood at midnight,” she said. “I failed to get it. Neither could I be by my husband when he breathed his last.”
Apart from whole blood, its components, such as plasma, red cells, fresh prism plasma, platelets and cryo, will also be available at nominal rates. “The centre will be a one-stop shop. It will collect, test, and distribute quality blood products to hospitals and nursing homes that do not have blood banks,” said Jadhav. There are 58 blood banks catering to close to 3,000 hospitals and nursing homes in the city.
The community bank will also look into several innovative methods to cash in on a dedicated list of donors. “We are planning to call up donors and celebrate their birthday at the centre,” said Jadhav. “We are expecting to have a bank of 20,000 litres of blood in the first year itself.”
Making an estimate, he said, “Every day, at least 33,000 people celebrate birthday in the city. If we can get even 1% of them to donate, it would be lots. There will also be mobile blood donation vans doing rounds of the city, he added.
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