The Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) has made an urgent appeal to donors to attend special walk-in clinics as it needs an additional 5,000 donations in just eight weeks.
This is an effort to avoid an amber alert situation, whereby hospitals would be asked to cancel elective surgeries due to a lack of blood supplies.
IBTS Operations Director Paul McKinney said, ”Since the start of June, we have issued more blood than we have collected as hospital demand has remained strong. The decline in units collected is most likely due to more donors travelling and COVID-19 levels increasing across the country again.”
The move to boost supplies comes after a pre-amber alert letter was issued to all hospitals last week, restricting issues to emergency orders and patient-specific requests.
An escalation to an amber alert would mean hospitals would have to stop elective surgery and use blood for emergencies only.
In a statement, the IBTS said, ”We are asking regular donors who are texted this week to please attend their nearest walk-in clinic and new donors should register their interest on give blood. ie, so the IBTS can contact them about attending a future clinic, when we are next at a location near them. For scheduled clinics after this week we are urging donors to book an appointment as usual and in particular to consider giving blood if they are eligible before they go on holidays.”
All donation clinics throughout the country will accept walk-in donors, including the IBTS clinics at Stillorgan in Dublin and St Finbarr’s in Cork, which will operate on a dual basis of appointment and walk-in donors.
“We appreciate it may take longer than normal to donate at walk-in clinics during this critical appeal. We sincerely apologise for that and would ask donors to bear with us,” Mr McKinney said.
“We feel this is a necessary step to take so we can bolster the supply.”