Plasma, platelets, and red blood cells can all be donated with human blood. Learn the components of human blood donations in this free video clip from a blood donation center.
There are three components that make up every whole blood donation that every donor gives. We do take, there's a unit of whole blood that you collect once you're in doing a donation. In that is a unit of red cells, there's a small unit of plasma, and then even a smaller unit of platelets in that one single donation that a donor gives as a unit of whole blood. The units, once we collect them, they are sent back to one of our product production labs. The products are then broken down, the components are broken down into their individual parts, and made ready for distribution to the hospital, depending on what the hospitals need. We do have the ability today, through automated collection processes, to do just platelet, which is a larger unit of platelets from a single donor, which is then matched to a patient in the hospital. And there's also a way for us today to take two units of just the single red cell parts. Red cell is the most used part of the whole blood donation as treatment in the hospitals. So anytime we can get on certain types two units of just red cells, not the whole blood, but two units of just red cells, it gives the donors along with those single donor platelets that have been collected, those have less chance of reaction from getting multiple transfusions because they can get them from one individual. And anytime you can cut down the patient's exposure to donors, there's a less risky chance of them either rejecting the units or having trouble with the unit, having a transfusion reaction possibly. So, we can, through automation, we can do a lot of different things. But the three components that make up the whole blood donation are red cells, platelets, and plasma.
