Curious about donating automated blood collections? Learn about automated blood donation collections in this free video clip from a blood donation center.
Barry Hooker has been working for the American Red Cross for 25 years. Currently, he is the director of recruitment for his region.
Automated collections is a growing part of the blood industry. It's allowing us as we know, most all blood collectors their donor base is shrinking. We hear that all the time, it's on the news all the time. The automated process actual allows us to collect two units of just red cells, one unit of red cells, one unit of plasma, two single units of platelets, even for specific patients. Anytime we can do automated collections on certain blood types we like to do that because it does is helps build the inventory of the components of the blood that actually need and use more of. Because we do use more of, obviously red cells that are O's and B's and we use a lot of platelets. So our automated collection allows us to collect just those individual products from donors and that then allows us to help our patients more in the hospital then can get less donor experiences to certain products be able to have less reactions to those products. And reactions can go as far, from you know just a slight fever, you may not even notice your having a reaction to a transfusion to other medical issues that are dealt with in the hospitals that we don't actually deal with here at the American Red Cross. Automation is a big thing for us, if your the certain blood types we need on certain days and your at a blood drive and we have automated machines there, you're going to be asked, ?Hey do you mind doing an automated donation today?" and then we can go into it that day. It's nothing that you?re going to notice after you leave the blood drive you're just going to be able to help us more with certain products that day because we can collect certain products through automation.
