Can you give blood? http://www.blood.co.uk/pages/flash_questions.html
Scottish Transfusion Service http://www.show.scot.nhs.uk/scotblood/
Where you can donate... http://www.show.scot.nhs.uk/scotblood/where_to_donate.html
P.S. I f I were you don’t take local anaesthetic:
The last nurse gave me the local 1.5cm from where she jagged me so it was totally pointless and meant I got stuck twice instead of once. I pointed that out and she told me that they’re not allowed to inject near veins (nurse protocol) and that the local took 10 minutes to work anyway... She was the head nurse on for the day. What a load of bollocks!!! Save yourself getting stuck twice - don’t get the local.
I personally think that you have to make the whole experience of giving blood as nice as possible in order for donors to keep on coming back. Especially if nurses are going to be practising their skills on donors with large potentially painful (if they miss and have to do it up to 4 times!) needles. It puts people off! So they need to teach their staff on how to give local correctly - because done correctly - local stings slightly (NOT even 1/2 as much as a bee sting as is what people often say!) , works instantly - and you shouldn’t feel the jag of the needle used to take blood off you AT ALL!
Another ideas is to have local topical creams for people to put on their skin before they come in if thy are regular donors - or as soon as they are in (as it takes 30-60 minutes to be effective) if 1st time donors.
Once nurses are properly trained on this - word gets around and all the people who are put off because of bad experiences in the past, people who have needle phobias (not the worst ones anyway!) etc. will come in to donate - stocks will increase and we’ll no longer have a bloody shortage!!!
I wrote a (nicer) comment to the blood transfusion service and here’s the reply (9.6.6)
Dear Dr Strachan
Many thanks for taking the time and trouble to write so thoughtfully. Donor recruitment and retention are major issues for us at present, and your comments and suggestions are most welcome.
The system of replacement donors for family members requiring transfusion is one we are very aware of. It is the commonest system in
developing countries, and I think Greece is now one of the very few Western countries using this method. The reason it is not favoured in developed countries is the fear that it offers too great an incentive to
potential donors to be economical with the truth. The principle of voluntary, altruistic donation is one of the main planks underpinning the very high degree of safety we can now claim for transfusion, and we
would be very loath to undermine it in any way.
Your comments on local anaesthetic are very interesting. The use of LA was routine when I came into BTS 20 years ago, but on my travels I was
impressed by the fact that virtually no other transfusion service used it, and donors seemed quite happy. We therefore did some trials locally, and as a result moved to the current position about 10 years ago, namely that donors who ask for LA can get it, but the default position is none. Very few new donors ask for it now, and its use is now on quite a small scale. Your observations suggest that it is so infrequent that some of the nurses may need a bit of refresher training!
I wonder if what you are picking up in your informal survey of donors is that they find the finger prick for haemoglobin testing to be really unpleasant? This is what our own research tells us, but as yet we have
not found a better way of doing it, though we are working on it.
More than 10 years ago we did a pilot study here of interactive computerised screening of donors, using the then new-fangled touch screens. By and large it was quite encouraging, and we knew that
research has shown that people are more likely to tell the truth to a computer than to a person. However, the logistics and cost at that time put us off any further development work, though colleagues in the USA have done some studies that do suggest that donors confess more to the computer screen. The logistical problems for the huge variety of venues we use in the community remain daunting, but perhaps it is time to start thinking about this again. Thank you for giving us a shove!
With kind regards
Jack Gillon
Dr Jack Gillon
Clinical Director
41 Lauriston Place
Edinburgh EH3 9HB
Tel: 0131.536.5320
Mob: 07786748332
Fax:0131.536.5412
e-mail jack.gillon@snbts.csa.scot.nhs.uk
Not quite what I meant about the finger pricking but hey... nice to get a non-defensive response. M
No comments:
Post a Comment