Читать книгу Transfusion Medicine - Jeffrey McCullough - Страница 75

As cytapheresis became a widely used method of producing blood components and the procedures began to take a place in the more routine operation of blood centers and hospitals, attention was directed to structured donor recruitment programs. This has raised considerations in addition to those for whole blood donors. The cytapheresis procedure is longer and thus requires more of a time commitment. In addition, the side effects, the nature of adverse reactions to donation, and the donor medical assessment are different from whole blood donation. Thus, the types of people to be approached about donation, the information they would be given, and the strategy to be used to obtain the best decision from the donor and potentially the highest acceptance rate became topics of great interest.

A key step in the development of cytapheresis donor programs was a conference that was held to address the scientific, legal, and ethical issues [49]. Issues such as the cost‐effectiveness of platelet transfusion, individual rights, informed consent, donor decision‐making mechanisms, and personal autonomy were discussed in the context of plateletpheresis donation. The results of this conference formed a sound basis for the development of cytapheresis donor programs. Because of the additional burden of cytapheresis donation, frequent whole blood donors were selected as possible cytapheresis donors. The provision of informational materials was often sufficient to attract them into cytapheresis donation [50]. Platelet donation was not only an altruistic act of giving, but it also filled some personal needs of the individual.

Apheresis now is the major platelet production method (see Chapter 2) occurring thousands of times each day. Recruitment continues to focus on successful whole blood donors who are provided information about apheresis donation. Some blood centers position the apheresis collection area within the site of whole blood donors as a recruitment technique. Because apheresis donation can be done more frequently than whole blood, this is another incentive for some donors.

Because this is a special pool of donors, there has been some work to find the special traits that distinguish apheresis donors from the existing pool of whole blood donors. Several firms can use consumer and demographic data to analyze a collector’s donors to see which ones are most amenable to recruitment as apheresis donors.