Blood Donation Questionnaire Video

Learn tips for filling out blood donation questions in this free video clip from a blood donation center.

About this Author

Barry Hooker has been working for the American Red Cross for 25 years. Currently, he is the director of recruitment for his region.

We do depend on our donors as they come in to obviously answer questions as honestly as possible. We at the American Red Cross believe our donor's honesty is our first, best step to collecting a safe and viable product for our hospital patients. So that's why we answer, or have you answer the questions that you do have to answer. We're up to about forty one questions now, that go kind of quickly because we do it on the computer, believe it or not, you just answer a quick yes or a no. So it's a lot quicker than it used to be, you don't have to take the pen and paper anymore and do that. But we do depend on that honest answer to make sure that we're collecting a safe product for our patients because we do not pay for blood donations here at the American Red Cross. So, what we do is, again, we ask you the questions, depend on your answers, we go over those answers with you when you finish the paperwork, or finish the questions, we go over those with you and make sure that everything does meet our criteria. Which is very strict, if you've ever donated before, you know that. We have, I have questions just about every week, "Why don't you just hold my answers from my last donation?". Well, the problem is, things change. And if we don't prompt, and try to get that answer from you by re-asking the question, or just, "Have you traveled lately?". You may have traveled somewhere in the last eight weeks that might be a cause for a deferral period for a certain amount of time. If we don't re-ask those questions each time, we're not going to know if you've had that vaccine for flu, or immunization against MMRs, or things like that. So, we have to ask the questions, and sometimes it gets us the answer we need to let the donors know, hey, we're sorry, we can't take you today, but we really need you to come back in four weeks, or six weeks, whatever the time frame would be for that deferral period. We want you to come back, we've just got to make sure that everything is out of your system from those past immunizations, or your travel experiences or exposures. We've got to make sure that everything is good before we can take you back, and that's why we get you to re-answer the questions every time you come in.