Today in 1667 - First documented human blood transfusion

The first fully-documented human blood transfusion was administered by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys, eminent physician to King Louis XIV of France, on June 15, 1667. He transfused the blood of a sheep into a 15-year old boy, who recovered. Denys performed another transfusion into a labourer, who also survived. Both instances were likely due to the small amount of blood that was actually transfused into these people. This allowed them to withstand the allergic reaction.

Read the Wikipedia entry

World Blood Donor Day - June 14th 2009

It's World Blood Donor Day, an annual day around the globe to celebrate the amazing gift of life that blood donation and transfusion gives to thousands of people every day, and especially to promote volunteer blood donation (as opposed to paid donors), as this ensures the safest supply of blood.

'If you call them, they will come...'

Spain


Italy


Canada


Testing a donor's blood pre-donation for haemoglobin levels in the olden days



'That wasn't so bad...'









This is what happens to your blood



In the past it used to be stored in glass jars, as these old Red Cross pictures show





The finished product



Pure human solidarity



Today and every day 1,700 people in the UK will receive a blood transfusion

Want to learn more? Click these links:

Outcome of the Blood Service strategic review

The review of the NBS restructuring strategy is now complete and these are the outcomes.

The outcry from hospitals, staff and the public at the dangerous and stupid proposals has meant that in the north and south-east, the board have been forced to scrap the idea of supercentres. One excellent victory that we can claim is that the Newcastle centre is now to remain fully open, and Sheffield also keeps many more functions.



But the axe still hangs over essential labs at centres across the country.

From the north and south-east of England, processing labs are still earmarked for closure at Leeds and Tooting, and testing labs are planned to be shut at Brentwood, Leeds and Tooting.

NBS RCI reference labs, which crossmatch blood for patients with rare or reactive blood types, are critical to have closely linked with hospitals in the area. Despite this, NBS directors still think that they can get away with closing RCI labs in Manchester, Southampton, Cambridge, to cut costs.

The NBS has also taken advice that it should consider ending its role in antenatal screening by 2011. This will cost more jobs, and will eventually cost the wider NHS as well. The NBS is able to do this testing at a fraction of what it costs hospitals to do it themselves. If they in fact extended their involvement in antenatal screening, they could create more income for NHS Blood and Transplant, as well as lightening the load on hospital budgets. It seems the word foresight is missing from the NBS management dictionary.

Interestingly the revised proposed strategy will cost a predicted 600 jobs, in addition to those slashed in the midlands and south-west consolidation. Before the review the figure of 600 applied to job losses in total across the whole country. It should also be noted that bosses want to cut more jobs in the extremely understaffed collection teams - at a time when collected donations are way below target.

Meanwhile in the midlands and south-west zone, directors are desperately clinging to the supercentre model, reluctant to face the humiliation of abandoning their flagship Filton supercentre venture. This was purposely left out of the review as bosses knew McKinsey & Co. would advise against such a drastic cut, as has been proven in the other two regions. Large processing labs from Birmingham, Southampton and Plymouth are still destined to be packed off to this white elephant. Directors also want to inexplicably uproot donor typing and patient screening from Colindale, and the national Cord Blood Bank from Edgware, to Filton in Bristol. The only apparent reason for this is an attempt to further justify that the shiny hangar is not going to be a terrible waste of resources.

Now that the factual support is crumbling, we have to push on campaigning against centralisation. No decision on the fate of our health services should ever be made based on keeping someone’s CV unsoiled.

Thanks to all campaign supporters for your valuable help so far - we’re getting there, and reason is on our side - let’s keep on fighting!

What are the plans - and why are they a threat?

Staff have been in industrial dispute with the NBS board of directors/management for many months now, over an unworkable reconfiguration strategy. It is proposed that all local processing and testing labs be closed, and their functions condensed into just three 'supercentres' to serve the whole of England and North Wales, in Bristol, Manchester and Colindale.

The rationale for this plan is a short-sighted financial one. The strategy was boasted about in the Financial Times before it was even announced to affected staff. Directors are justifying centralisation because the demand from hospitals for red cells is currently falling, while the cost of each pack of red cells is rising. It suits them to assume this projected decline in demand will continue, despite an aging UK population and looming threats such as a flu pandemic. Other service areas that we provide, like platelets and transplants, are growing, but this seems to be ignored to fit with the market-minded strategy.

A study for respected journal Vox Sanguinis by Dr. A Pereira found that larger blood processing and testing centres do not necessarily lead to economies of scale.
Link here - registration needed for full text, but overview available to all.

We say that patients' welfare should be our number one concern, not tightening the purse strings to win praise from the Department of Health.

The National Blood Service is in fact a financially successful and efficient part of the NHS, which, unlike many health Trusts, is not in debt. The management proposals are purely based on cost-cutting and speculation by accountants. Our bosses have no problem with spending undisclosed thousands of taxpayers' money on parasitic external consultancy agencies.

The NBS directors plan to make overall 600 staff - half of the laboratory workforce - redundant. They claim this will save the service millions. (Surprisingly, just before the strategy was announced, around 50 new high level Band 7 posts were created, which cost the NBS £1.9 million in salaries.) These are highly specialised and skilled staff, many of whom have worked for the NBS for decades, and have never worked anywhere else. Opportunities for transfer to the new supercentres or suitable redeployment elsewhere in the crisis-stricken NHS are few and far between.

The new supercentres will be huge factories running on harsh anti-social 24 hour shift rotas to cope with the workload. At each site the NBS will have to wastefully recruit and train new workers, having just thrown the existing loyal workforce onto the scrapheap.

There are fears about road congestion delaying the smooth flow of products around the country. Our ability to respond in case of major incident could be compromised. There will be no south-east centre outside the M25, no centre at all north of London to the east of the Pennines, and no centre for the West Midlands (including the diverse needs of the second city, Birmingham). Police figures back up staff concerns about jams on long south-west transport routes. Blood collections from local mobile sessions and permanent donor centres would have to be driven hundreds of miles around the country to and from the supercentres, putting even more reliance on an already overloaded and frequently clogged up motorway network, and shortening the life-span of the products. The same would apply for patients' samples, increasing the risk of them being misplaced, wrongly stored or wrongly labelled.

Although the NBS vehicle fleet has been commended for its use of green fuel, adding to traffic volume is bad for the environment. Consider the effects of a major road traffic accident. There will be people needing blood which cannot be delivered because of the traffic chaos caused by the same accident. The suggestion of transporting blood by helicopter in an emergency is ludicrous - they have to be crewed and maintained which would be an impossible cost.

The official line is that services which need to be close to hospitals will stay there, like the issue blood banks. Staff believe otherwise. A patient died this week waiting to be rushed a 'washed' platelet from the local centre. 'Washing' is just one of many special processes done by the components lab - which is being centralised. 40% of samples crossmatched by our special investigations department (on-call day and night, 365 days a year) are classed as 'emergency'.

Staff do not believe that centralisation will make the Blood Service more efficient. We know best, not managers, the day-to-day and hour-to-hour needs of our hospitals and patients. We have good working relationships with our users, and essential local knowledge. Hospitals could be forced to spend more on training their own haematology staff, larger storage capacity and reagents for their own testing.
Despite what the directors say, neither employees or service users have had any meaningful input into the strategy - the service's future is being dictated to us all from on high.



For more information you can contact iww.nbs[AT]googlemail.com (replace [AT] with @)

Welcome to this blog

This blog is written and published by individual NBS staff. All opinions are the authors' own. This blog has no connections with any official organisations.

It has been set up to inform the public of a side of our current story which we feel needs wider exposure.

The National Blood Service is under severe attack from a restructuring strategy which staff are strongly opposed to. We want the public, including blood donors and patients, to be aware of the whole situation, as stakeholders, alongside the staff, in the future of the Service.

Thanks for reading, and please get in touch for more information.

Please visit us again for regular updates.

So, what exactly does the Blood Service do anyway?

The National Blood Service is a vital part of the NHS. We deliver blood, blood products and tissues from our 15 blood centres for transfusion to patients anywhere in England and North Wales.

We depend entirely on voluntary donations given generously by the general public.

Our processing labs filter donations and split them into components including red cells (often used for operations or major traumas), white cells (often used for leukaemia patients), frozen plasma (often used for serious burns victims) and platelets (used for those who have disorders with clotting).
Our testing labs test every unit to determine which group it belongs to. There are 8 groups: O+ (the most common), O-, A+, A-, B+, B-, AB+ and AB- (the rarest). There are further specialist groups within these, like Sickle Cell negative. Every donation is also rigorously screened for infections so that it is safe for patients. The blood which patients receive is specially matched to their individual medical needs and can make the difference between life and death.

Our staff are highly experienced and trained in the latest transfusion science research available.

Every year we collect, test, process, store and issue 2.1 million blood donations.

Our National Health Service would not be able to function without the National Blood Service.