Experts say state lacks system to prevent wastage of blood units

Lack of a centralised blood transfusion system with in the state is leading to wastage of blood, according to experts.

Dr C Shivram, Head of Transfusion Medicine, Manipal Hospitals, said that the state has a highly fragmented transfusion service and it is important to have a central system for blood transfusion services.

“The state currently has 200 blood banks which update their stock of blood every month on a website, naco-sims.nic.in (Strategic Information Management System) and Jeeva Sanjeevani, where blood storage is updated on a daily basis,” said deputy director of Blood Safety, Karnataka State AIDS Prevention Society (KSAPS), Dr Prakash K.

According to Dr Prakash, the government conducts two blood donation camps every year in PHCs within the state and blood donations at panchayat levels.

According to the data from KSAPS, there was a 4.3% increase in the number of blood units collected between April 2014 and March 2017, while there was an increase of 9.5% in the number of blood units discarded in the same time period.

With the blood requirement at just 1% of the total population of Karnataka, the state has enough blood donations to meet the demand. While the year 2014-2015 saw a collection of 7,54,485 units, it was 7,46,716 units during the period 2015-2016. In 2016-2017, the collection was 7,87,330 units.

“It is a good trend that the number of blood donations are almost constant. More blood banks are storing blood after separating the blood components. As long as this practice exists, we don’t need many donors, as different components from a single blood donor can be used for more than one person,” said Dr Shivram.

According to experts, a multitude of reasons contribute to the wastage of blood units which is a factor which can be minimised but not eradicated.

According to the data from KSAPS, the number of blood units wasted during 2014-2015 was 59,263, while in 2015-2016, it was 64,361 and for the  2016-2017 period, it was 64,913.

“The increase in the number of units wasted over the years is because of better reporting from all blood banks in the state,” said Dr Prakash