Panagiotis Katsivelas: The challenges of donating blood

Written by Panagiotis Katsivelas, Medical Pathologist, president of the National Blood Donation Center (EKEA).

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Blood Donation in our country has undoubtedly presented positive news and results in terms of the adequacy of Blood and its derivatives without, of course, ignoring that there are still problems that we need to solve or that there is no room for further improvement of the individual indicators.

Let’s start from the fact that our country needs approximately 550,000 units per year or 45000 units every month or 1500 units per day.

To the question of whether we collect the requested units of blood every year, the answer is that we achieve the collection and indeed in 68.7% of our voluntary blood donors, a performance significantly improved compared to 2020 when the percentage of voluntary blood was 52 % of total blood collected. It is certainly something that we can and must improve with the ultimate goal of reaching the full coverage of our needs with voluntary blood.

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We collect the necessary amount of blood every month of the year. This is where the aforementioned problems begin.

The challenges of Blood Donation in the summer months

While all months of the year we have sufficient blood collection, we cannot say that the same is the case with the two summer months, July and August. However, we are far behind in collecting blood from our needs. We must not allow it to become a habit to accept and settle for it. We all have to fix this and have full sufficiency in the summer months as well. Let’s look at the available data for the above months in the last three years.

Don’t be fooled by the previous years, things were much worse.

It becomes evident that in these two months we are constantly collecting smaller amounts of blood than our needs, despite the significant improvement for 2024. In 2024 we managed to make more than 2800 blood transfusions easier.

If we further analyze the blood collection in the month of August 2024, the small lag was observed entirely in Northern Greece while in southern and island Greece the blood collection in August 2024 was the same as that of August 2023 although August 2024 had more holidays, which also has its value. On holidays we collect about 1/3 of the collection on working days of the week. It is not a given that the Attica basin is empty of inhabitants in the month of August, especially from the young population the problem is more intractable.

Part of the blood needs of these two months are covered by the hyper-concentration of blood that we try to have, especially in the month of June, but this possibility is also limited since the possibility of preserving blood is not unlimited and in fact the red blood cells can be preserved in maximum 42 days and platelets only five days. This means that if the blood flow if not sustained and continuous with significant amounts of blood it is sure to lead to deficiencies, especially of Platelets, which are needed by patients who have problems with blood clotting and present or are threatened with bleeding.

This causes problems in the treatment of patients with chronic hematological problems, such as patients with Mediterranean anemia, with chronic anemias, etc. something that cannot be accepted. We must and must fix it.

Factors affecting blood donation

If we take for granted the consequences of climate change and the prevalence of high temperatures of heatwave conditions with longer duration and higher temperatures it is certain that in the future we will have more problems and obstacles in maintaining sufficient amounts of blood in the summer months. The report is about climate change and its consequences because on the one hand Blood Donation is affected by even small social or climatic changes on the other hand assessing the impact of the Tempe Floods last year and compared to this year we can say that our resulted in a shortfall in the blood collection of approximately 1,500 blood units.

Fortunately, our volunteer blood donors, always in the month of September, by making an effort to oversupply blood, cover the deficits of the summer and before the end of the month, a normality occurs again in the operation of Blood Donations.

Assessing the flow of Blood I can say that this year we managed to limit both the duration and the size of the crisis.

Conclusions

In conclusion, to deal with this negative phenomenon in Blood Donation, we must embrace that:

The case of Blood Donation is the case of all of us, it does not concern only some romantic fellow human beings.

Achieving blood sufficiency on a constant basis goes through our hand, or more precisely our veins and mainly our heart.

The needs of our society, the diseases and the need for blood never stop, not even in the summer of course.

Illness is not an event that will always involve someone else.

We all have to try harder and it is certain that a greater effort always brings a better result.

We must not compromise with our weaknesses, try to overcome them.

Let’s all start a solid plan for the whole coming year by including in our planning, to make a bigger effort for the coming summer.