As part of the JanaSahayog initiative of Mitra Foundation, we have been conducting 2 blood donation camps in the LBS Nagar area, over the past 8 years. In all we had conducted 16 camps, with a total collection crossing 1000 units. We had our last camp on 22nd Sept 2019, and were scheduled to the have the next one on 23rd Mar 2020. While we had initiated the preparation and communications for this camp, we ran into a the Covid 19 challenges, and the start of lockdown forcing us to cancel it, while we had time to understand how the situation pans out and see what would be the appropriate approach.
In the current Covid situation, there is a reduction in the need for Blood, as there were fewer surgeries etc being taken up, but the need for blood for some of the other needs like those suffering from various anemic diseases, sickle cell disease or various forms of blood cancer is as in normal times. After the initial periods of lockdown, the shortage of blood at the hospitals and blood banks has become more prominent. We have been in touch with a couple of blood banks to monitor the situation.
With the intent of sustaining our normal cadence of enabling our community to donate blood on a regular basis, we have started to look for ways that will factor in the necessary precautions to enable a safe donation from the volunteers minimizing their exposure to risks. The government has already recognized this and came out with an Advisory for Voluntary Blood Donation during COVID – MoHFW. The BMST-TTK blood bank has recently adapted one of their ambulances as a mobile blood donation van, and Standard Operation Procedures, to set up mini-camps. After satisfying ourselves that we would be comfortable getting our community volunteers to donate in this setup, we set out to plan our first Mitra Foundation mini-camp.
As part of the preparation, we had to identify a group of donors who are comfortable donating given the above setup, identify a location where we could have the mobile van setup, and have a protocol to have the registered donors arrive at set times to come donate. We were able to identify 15 potential donors between 3 of the neighboring apartments, and plan the camp on July 12th.
On the day of the camp, the BMST-TTK blood bank team arrived at 9:15am, and we had started the donations from 9:30am. The team included a doctor, couple of assistants – one for the prescreening, and one to monitor during the donation in the van, and an additional person to coordinate the activity. By around noon, we had all the 15 people go through the screening process, and 13 of them successfully donate. It took about 12 minutes per successful donation. The Blood bank people had got refreshments for the donors, including juice and biscuits, and from our side we had arranged for Bananas.
In terms of the precautions and the SOP, the whole area around the van was disinfected before setting up the doctors table and the start of the camp. At any point there is only 1 donor in the van donating. We had set up chairs for the next donor to wait outside the van, as well as for those who have completed the donation to have their refreshments, while maintaining social distancing. The bed for the donor in the van was sanitized after each of the donations, for the next donor. All the people at the camp were always wearing the masks. At the end of the camp the whole area was again disinfected. The whole camp went through without any issues.
In our regular camps in normal times we averaged about 65-70 successful donations. As mentioned in this camp we could get 13 successful donations from a subset of the community. We would now like to use this experience to enable more such mini-camps within our community with different collection points. We hope to get to another 4-5 camps in the next 2 months. Looking forward to the support of the community.
Please do contact us if you are interested in organizing a similar camp in your community.
