Whole Blood, Minutes Matter: Bringing Life-Saving Transfusions to the Scene of Trauma

But blood transfusions begin with blood donation.

And Chelsea, since the pandemic, as I mentioned a moment ago, it seems like blood donations have continued to lag, and blood collection centers are a whisper away from critical shortage all the time.

Is that perception, or is it also reality?

I wish it was just perception.

Unfortunately, it's very much a reality, not just for us here in Kansas City, but for our blood supply nationally.

We are currently experiencing an emergency blood shortage right here in the Kansas City metro because we're not seeing donors come in the door in the ways that we need.

I think we were all a little surprised as well to see the World Cup impacts, um, on our blood supply.

A lot of folks were avoiding the city while the World Cup activity was going on, and what we, what we saw was people weren't coming in and donating in the way that they were.

Um, it unfortunately led us into an emergency blood shortage, especially when we saw the national supply drop too.

The national supply is kind of what we blood centers fall back on if locally our donations aren't keeping up with hospital demand.

And so when nationally we start to see a drop too, it makes it a little bit more dangerous for us here in Kansas City.

So unfortunately are on, um, an emergency blood appeal right now.

Um, we're also tracking kind of a broader trend of a loss of donations here in the Kansas City metro area.

Almost 20% of our donor base we've lost since COVID.

Oh, God.

Um, I think-

That's a lot.

Yeah.

It is a lot.

It's a lot.

It amounts to more than 20,000 donors that were donating regularly with us pre-COVID, haven't come back or have lapsed out of donation over the last several years.

Lots of reasons that could be.

Um, we know that, you know, this post-COVID world we're in is a challenging one still for our organization, for, for the healthcare community.

Um, but we, we are trying, um, our best to get folks back in the door, um, to increase donations from those who are coming in the door and trying to get these 20,000 donors to come back and see us.

So programs like this one rely on those folks making these donations.