I have to get a draw for lab work twice a year as part of routine physicals. And I also go to the blood bank four times per year to donate double red cells (this is the fastest cycle they permit for double reds). Is there any reason the blood bank couldn’t do the routine lab draw for us?
They could charge for the service of course.
They’re already hooked up, and a lab work draw seems like a pretty small quantity that wouldn’t interfere with the quantity we can donate. They of course do actually take lab draws for their internal QC program (which doesn’t give individual results and doesn’t test for all the conditions of interest in routine physicals).
Doing a draw or a donation takes two or three hours, when I include driving and crowded waiting rooms. I don’t mind the stick, but it’s hard to accommodate these in a busy schedule. I think this would be a major incentive to donate more often (for those who donate but not as often as allowed), as we’d be getting two things done at once.
I’m donating later today and just called to ask (nope) and suggest (that’s not in the cards, no they don’t do that, etc etc, wouldn’t even say they’d pass along the suggestion).
I read that getting and keeping frequent donors is a problem, and other incentives like paying donors generates other problems for the quality of the donations. But why couldn’t they do this, in a way that is cost neutral (or better) for them, and improve their donation rate?
They have the infrastructure for delivering large quantities of blood to institutions that need blood. They don’t have the infrastructure for delivering a few vials each here and there to any of 15 different hospitals in their area. How are you envisioning this working, one of the blood bank employees driving your test tubes over to your hospital every time you donate?
While the RC does it’s own diagnostic testing, that’s for their own purposes. They are not setup to be a general diagnostic lab. They could do the draw and send it to one of the big diagnostic labs, but what’s in it for them? Sure, it ends up being more convenient for you, but it would be a huge headache for them. They’re not short of money these days, they’re short of donors and phlebotomists. Thank you for being a regular blood donor. I am one also, and there aren’t nearly enough of us in the US.
I’m not sure the fasting required before a lab draw is the best thing to combine with significantly reducing your blood supply, no matter how much juice and cookies you eat afterward.
I believe that this is an excellent suggestion. Even if done coming at it the other way around. If the blood bank is a separate organization that shares the office.
Hi, I’m Susan and I’ll be taking blood for your diagnostic test today.
Hi, I’m Bob and after Susan is done would you like to donate blood?
How common is it for people healthy enough to donate blood to need routine blood work? Asking sincerely; maybe it’s a lot. The only time I’ve needed frequent blood tests was when I was taking a drug that could potentially harm my liver, and therefore made me ineligible to donate anyway.
But it’s an interesting idea. The COVID antibody tests were well-received as a replacement incentive for movie tickets. Some folks who don’t actually need bloodwork might be interested in having their various cholesterol/vitamin/etc. levels checked, just for their own personal awareness. Some might be interested in genetic screening.
They can’t be that short. I went to donate, they wasted an hour and a half of my time before telling me they could not use my blood because I lived in the U.K. in the 1980s. Mad cow disease, 30 years later?
I’m wondering if OP’s suggestion might have more merit the other way around - labs that draw analytical samples taking (or at least promoting) donations? Or at least some of them - the lab I go to is right next to a hospital, and all part of the same big provider.
But maybe (in addition to the logistical/infrastructure issues) it’s not a good idea because a lot of people going for bloodwork will be going because they are ill. My visits have usually been draws for my routine checkup, but I’m not sure what proportion that would be overall.
Ooooo… dang… didn’t think of that! I withdraw the suggestion. Or, at least, the solution isn’t apparent to me.
As to some of the other points:
Healthy people need bloodwork done regularly. Or at least at my age we do. I assumed everybody did, but I guess I started getting regular bloodwork because I aged into it, not because medical practice changed.
Makes me wonder what other changes were because of my age rather than medical advancements. Do younger people get shots in glass syringes that get washed afterwards, the way I used to? Are medical records private for young people too?
As to the business model, I don’t know much about how labs and blood banks operate anyway. I’d have guessed a public facing phlebotomy volunteer organization with cookies and recliners and television sets and marketing would have subcontracted out all the lab work done on vials, not used their own internal labs, so it would have just been selecting different options. In fact, perhaps the lab work for a routine physicals would cover the things the blood bank screens for, or easily could, so there’d actually be some savings.
As to what’s in it for them, given that donors and phlebotomists are what are in short supply: making donation way more productive for the donor would increase donors, and making the many people who operate like I do get 4 sticks a year instead of 6 would reduce the need for phlebotomists.
Umm… you were disqualified for obvious medical reasons. This had nothing to do with their need for whole blood. They had to make sure your blood was safe to use before wasting your time taking it.
Moreover, in a sense, your complaint is that they didn’t get to your disqualifying question earlier in the process. But around here, it would be a pretty tiny fraction of people who lived in the U.K. in the 80’s. Some of the most common exclusion reasons get vetted during the appointment making process, or at least quite early, at my blood bank.
I’m not sure if you were implying that the phlebotomists were volunteers, or the donors were volunteers. The phlebotomists are paid professionals and as a donor, I get a small stipend to donate blood in my area (I am O negative CMV negative, a fairly rare combination that is suitable for newborns).
AIUI, they do all of the lab work themselves since they take full responsibility for the draw from the time you walk in to volunteer for the drive until the time it is delivered to the hospital. They have specific things they need to test for, and presumably, have a very efficient diagnostic procedure for telling them what they need to know.
And our local blood drives don’t have TVs or recliners unless you’re donating platelets, which can take 90 minutes. For our blood drive, you’re donating whole blood which usually takes 8-10 minutes. They do, though, have a radio playing in the background.
I’m healthy and donate whole blood every 8 weeks, but I also need to have a vial of blood taken annually since I’m susceptible to Primary Adrenal Insufficiency. I’m guessing that’s pretty rare.
For certain values of “obvious”. This first graph in this paper shows the annual incidence of vCJD, the form of Creutzfeld-Jakob attibuted to consumption of BSE-contaminated meat.
There is some evidence that vCJD could in principle be transmitted via contaminated blood. But people within the UK have donated and received of the order of 50 million units of blood in the decades since the BSE outbreak… and yet as time has passed since we eliminated BSE-contaminated meat from the food chain, the number cases has dropped to zero. (Note that there can be a long incubation period, so the ~3 cases per hear still occurring through ~2011 are almost certainly all still attributable to consumption of contaminated beef decades earlier.)
There is a theoretical risk that blood from an asymptomatic person who ate beef in the U.K. in the 1980s could infect someone with vCJD. The magnitude of that risk is probably similar to the risk of being killed by a meteorite.
It’s more that the disqualifying reason was stupid.
I mean, I suppose I shouldn’t complain - I get the kudos for volunteering without the minor physical inconvenience of actually having them take my burger-tainted blood.
I’ve been disqualified a few times for low iron levels in my blood. I went to my PCP and he confirmed I was borderline anemic. I started taking a low-dose iron supplement and never had that issue again.
In the mid-90s I was disqualified for a year because at one point I had a high level of ALT. According to this, it could have been caused by a variety of things. High levels of ALT may indicate liver damage from hepatitis, infection, cirrhosis, liver cancer, or other liver diseases. I was deferred from donating for a year. I was eventually cleared and went back in to donate and they didn’t see the elevated ALT and haven’t seen it since.
Their goal is to keep the blood supply as clean as possible, so anything that could even remotely mean there is a problem they will flag. Better safe than sorry.
Before you are taken in for your medical interview you are usually given a booklet that goes over the questions you are going to be asked. I’m pretty sure it mentions MCD and how long you lived in the UK etc. Did you read the booklet they gave you, assuming they have you one?
You cannot just excuse stupidity that ignores the magnitude of the risk as “better safe than sorry”. The risk is never zero with any donation. The only way to be completely safe is to stop taking blood donations altogether.
They cannot simultaneously whine that there is a huge crisis in blood bank levels, while rejecting donations for irrational reasons.