597: Should You Have The Right to Choose Your Blood Donor? With Liz James

And that's literally that day was the true inception of this is how it's going to go.

So help me understand, you're not an actual blood bank, right? But what service do you provide? So if I was to become a member of your organization, how could I help and how could I benefit?

Okay, so we are not a blood bank.

To be a blood bank requires enormous hurdles and lots and lots of money, like millions and millions and millions of dollars.

So what how we've gotten around the process of that is blood banks exist all across the United States and we work with blood banks.

They don't know that we're working with them, you know, other than if they're listening to this conversation right now.

But we help match for our members who who and they don't.

If we have a member who needs blood, that member reaches out to us and opens up a case.

We have a database and we begin reaching out to our members who we know are a blood type match.

So all of our members need to know their blood type.

They don't have to be they don't have to know their blood type when they first sign up.

But if they need help and if we need help from them, we got to know their blood type at some point.

Right.

We also teach our members how to talk to their doctor so as not to create a hostile environment, because you can do that in a hot minute if you're not careful.

If for some reason they're in a situation or in an area where, where we've already determined there is a potential problem and this could be something that we would not be able to help facilitate them.

And if we were not able to help, the reason most likely is because the blood bank is not friendly.

And this is where it gets very interesting.

While, yes, there are some doctors who will refuse to write orders, and there are some hospitals who refuse to carry out orders that are written by the doctor, which is its own concern.

They're not allowing the doctor to practice medicine.

Even more concerning are the there are blood banks who are flat out denying the right to direct donor blood as a corporate policy.

And, you know, our question is, and to date, we don't have an answer for this.

How is it that a corporate entity can practice medicine as a blanket policy, knowing what's right for every individual patient? Yeah.

That's a big problem.

But their policy is based on profit and not on patient care.

Yes.