The Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) has appealed to the Donegal public to donate blood as the number of donations has fallen since the Covid-19 pandemic.
The group, which has issued ‘pre-Amber’ shortage alerts to hospitals, said the national supply in most groups has fallen to three days in recent weeks – they plan to have seven days in stock at all times.
They hope to get an additional 2,000 donations over the next five weeks and appealed to regular and new donors to go to their nearest clinic.
Paul McKinney, Director of Operations at IBTS, said the service is currently at a “pre-Amber” alert stage.
“When we get to three days supply, we issue a pre-Amber warning to the hospitals which is to inform them that our stocks are short, we are taking action to try and correct that and we ask them to reduce their stock holding where we can and we work with them in terms of the units will be issued to them,” he said.
“Hence, we take actions such as asking or launching a national appeal to avoid going to the next step, which is an Amber Alert. We’ve never had to do it in Ireland before.
“An Amber Alert is a situation where hospitals are asked to consider what elective surgeries they can actually manage not to do or postpone until we get the stock levels back to where they need to be.”
There is currently an active donor base of around 85,000 and were getting 17,500 to 18,000 pre-Covid. This number has almost halved.
McKinney also said that hospital demand is very high at the moment and that the IBTS issued more red cells and platelets than it has for the last 10 years.
Information on how to donate blood can be found at www.giveblood.ie.
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