Make Blood Free
Blood, once donated, can be used for only one purpose – to save lives.
Donated blood cannot be transfused to any patient without certain processing and tests.
Let’s look into the activities that happen to make available safe blood and blood components to patients:
- Social marketing to create awareness on voluntary blood donation and get the potential donor to donate blood. One out of 30 calls succeed.
- Collection of donated blood into a sterile single use disposable bag (cost varies for single, double, triple bags and the quality of the bags).
- Post Donation care – refreshments, donor certificate, donor card.
- Donor blood grouping and Red Cell antibody screening.
- Separation of Blood into components.
- Storage of the blood and blood components at appropriate temperatures – till given to patient or discarded for various reasons.
- Testing the donated blood to ensure safety – this might vary from blood bank to blood bank based on the number of tests and the quality of testing.
- Compatible testing to identify the correct unit for transfusion for a given patient.
- Expense relating to discard of blood units which have already been tested and found unfit for use.
- Packing and release of the identified unit to the hospital.
- Cost involved in safe disposal of waste generated (bio-medical waste disposable)
- Employee cost (salary).
- Cost of purchase and maintenance of expensive equipments.
- Rent, electricity, and cost of diesel to run the generator.
It costs on an average Rs. 2000 to process single blood donation.
In the absence of any government support, blood banks have to recover these expenses either from the patients who can afford to reimburse them or by way of donations from the society it supports.
Government blood banks also spend money to process blood and the same comes from the taxpayer’s money! There are many who cannot even reimburse the cost of processing .
Hence Jeevan’s Make Blood Free programme. You can help.
Your donation, among others, will help those with Cancer, Thalassemia and long standing kidney disease
Your donation is eligible for income tax exemption under section 80G of IT Act.
