Financial Express: Blood Availability And Safety In India
India Must Create A Policy Framework To Address All Aspects Of Blood Availability And Safety
Financial Express, K Madan Gopal and Suryaprabha Sadasivan, 25 February 2020
(Image courtesy of Financial Express)
If it hurts to think that many children sleep hungry while tonnes of food rots in fridges, realise the same may be happening with donated blood while lives are being lost. In India, it’s possible that a trauma patient loses his life if the blood bank in the hospital he lands up in doesn’t have his blood type. This may happen even as another blood bank nearby has stocks of the required blood type that will eventually expire unused. This may sound criminal, but it happens because most blood banks in India have no links with each other. They are not well-coordinated, which stops them from sharing resources and functioning efficiently for the very purpose blood is stored, i.e. saving lives.
Today, blood transfusion in our country relies on a fragmented blood-supply system, where control is exercised by different levels of the government, but at the point of delivery, the patient and his family have to run around arranging for blood themselves. Currently, there are myriad challenges, ranging from shortage, wastage, lack of standardisation to access and availability of safe blood. As per the official data of 2016-17, there was a shortage of 1.9 million units.
