Sadika Al Mahmoudi (right), Medical Manager of HMC Blood Donation Center, with a donor.
Doha: Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC)'s Blood Donation Center periodically calls for volunteer donors as the demand for blood supplies has increased in the country with the expansion of healthcare facilities, said Sadika Al Mahmoudi, Medical Manager of HMC Blood Donation Center.
Also the eligibility to donate blood after returning from a trip to an area where malaria is found and having Hijama/tattoo has been reduced from one year to three months as per regulations of AABB, an international, not-for-profit association representing individuals and institutions involved in the fields of transfusion medicine and cellular therapies, she told The Peninsula.
Blood Transfusion Services in Qatar have achieved 100% voluntary non-enumerated blood donation since 2010 and has maintained this so far.
This was achieved through gradual phasing-out of family replacement blood donations, which has constituted significant part of the donor pool in the past.
“It is true that we are 100 percent self-sufficient in the sense that we do not import any blood units from outside the country and rely entirely on our local volunteer donors. However, due to the ever expansion of health care facilities there is an exponential increase of demands for blood supplies,” she Al Mahmoudi.
“So, during the last few years many new hospitals have been launched and there is a great expansion of clinical and surgical activities which demand a lot of blood transfusion support such as bone marrow transplant and other organs transplants such as liver transplant and kidney transplants, and open heart surgeries. That is why in spite of the increasing number of donors we still experience some period of shortages of blood supply and that’s why we sometimes advertise in social media to call for more donors,” she added.
Blood Donation Center has a large number of registered donors of which more than 30% are Qataris and those actually constitute the most stable portion of the donor pool. The remaining donors are expatriates. Although this number is large, but it is subject to constant changes related to the continuous flow of donors.
“During the last few years, there has been a considerable expansion of our donor pool although the increase is not as proportional as expected related to the size of the population expansion and we are aiming for recruitment of more donors to enrich our donor pool,” said Al Mahmoudi. Blood donation is a very safe procedure and adverse are very rare and even when occur they are usually very mild and post no threat to the donor.
To ensure that the process of donation is safe potential donors are very carefully assessed for suitability before they can donate and to make sure that the procedure caries no hazard to the donors.
