Читать книгу Transfusion Medicine - Jeffrey McCullough - Страница 74

It is generally believed that the most effective way to get someone to donate blood is to ask directly and personally [4, 7, 44]. For instance, in one study comparing two recruitment techniques, the direct “foot in the door” approach was found to be superior to a general request to participate in a donor program [45]. When people were asked their reasons for not donating, the most common response was “no one ever asked” [7]. The wide variety of settings in which blood is collected may also affect an individual’s willingness to donate. Different motivations may apply to donation in different settings, or the setting may influence an individual’s willingness to donate. However, for either the fixed or the mobile site, substantial efforts are made to specifically ask the individual to donate and, if possible, schedule the donation. This request may be made by paid staff of the donor organization or by volunteers. It is not clear whether either type of individual is more effective. Many blood centers with large donor programs have implemented computerized calling systems that integrate the donor files with the donor’s history along with automated dialing systems to maximize the efficiency of the telephoning process.

Usually blood donors are asked to give to the general community blood supply. Sometimes donors are asked to donate blood for one or more specific patients. Newman et al. [46] found that these patient‐related blood drives were easier to organize, produced more blood, and left the donors and staff with a stronger sense of satisfaction because of the more personal nature of the experience.

Little structured social science research has been directed to the issue of minority involvement in the blood donation process. Some success in increasing blood donation by minorities has been achieved by involving more minority staff in the recruitment and blood donation process (M. Wingard, quoted in O’Brien [47]). Compared with Hispanic nondonors, Hispanic donors were found to be better educated, to be more likely to speak English, to have higher job status, and to be more likely to have parents who were donors [48]. The study concluded that there is a need for improved education for Hispanic donors about the safety of blood donation. With the general aging of the population and the extending of age limits for blood donation, donation has been found to be safe for older persons. However, there are no unique recruitment strategies targeted to older donors. Because more blood is collected at colleges and high schools, the materials and publicity are designed to appeal to that age group, and thus could be considered to be targeted to this population segment.

Another issue in donor recruitment is whether to devote more effort to recruitment of new donors or to maintaining existing donors. New donors add to the overall files and replace donors inevitably lost because of attrition or disqualification. Thus, it is essential to replenish the donor pool. However, once people are in the donation habit, strategies to encourage them to continue result in the collection of substantial amounts of blood for less effort than is required to recruit new donors. Therefore, the dilemma is not in choosing only one of these strategies, but in balancing the effort between them to maintain an adequate donor file and also to produce new donors with a reasonable amount of effort. In the interest of overall operational efficiency, there has also been a push to recruit donors to “right type, right technology”; for example, group O donors are guided toward whole blood or automated apheresis red blood cell (RBC) collections, because their RBCs are in highest demand, whereas group AB donors are guided toward platelets or plasma because their RBCs are often unused. Excess collections or outdated products are “red ink” to a blood collector.

Some blood centers have taken steps to identify donors based on self‐reported ethnicity data. This has helped to provide certain ethnicity‐associated RBC phenotypes for difficult‐to‐match blood recipients. Several high‐profile national calls for “rare blood types” have recently been serviced by centers who could provide ethnically matched donors. This may over time increase the prevalence of blood donation in these ethnic groups.