Mary Wakefield
Why can’t I give blood?
I read about the national shortage of blood last week with a feeling of gloomy inevitability. The brains of the nation are scrambled, Westminster’s insane, of course the country’s bleeding out. But at least, I thought, I can help a bit. I’ve given blood in the past and I enjoy it. There’s the feeling of warmth and purpose, and biscuits. I’d never fork out for a packet of custard creams, but like most English women and men I’m a sucker for one or two free on a saucer in a medical setting.
Our blood donor scheme is actually all-round cheery. Each country has its own circulatory system, a flow out from the veins of donors, off to hospitals and into patients. Some countries have to resort to paying donors for blood, and the inevitable result is a contaminated supply. Addicts, desperate for cash, lie about their blood-borne diseases. There’s almost no way to screen them out. So the best systems in the world rely on unpaid donors, willing to give without knowing where their blood will go. There’s no call here, yet, for a scheme that allows you to ensure your blood isn’t used to revive a Tory – that’s heartening too.
So I went to the NHS website feeling almost upbeat. I found the link marked ‘Give Blood’, and clicked: ‘Oops! Something’s gone wrong.’ I should have sensed what would come next. I know that ‘Oops!’. It’s a regular and loathsome feature of all government sites. It implies just a cheeky little anomaly, nothing to fret about. But a broken link when you’re trying to pay a bill or sort out your housing or help alleviate a national blood shortage isn’t lovable or roguish.
‘Try again later,’ said the site, so I did repeatedly, dementedly, until on the 27th attempt I got through to a list of possible donation sites. London EC2, that’s not too far, but the first available donation slot was 13 February 2023. Next: Merchant Street, E3? First slot: 9 February. And that was it for my part of London.
How and why, in the middle of a blood shortage, is it impossible to donate blood? I find it hard to understand. And why is there so little explanation for all the prospective donors out there? The blood shortage was reported everywhere, with terrible accompanying warnings about operations that would have to be delayed (again) and transplant patients dying for want of blood. NHS Blood and Transplant must have known the horror stories would bring a surge of visitors to their site. You’d have to have very little faith in humans to think it wouldn’t. So why the pitiful lack of attention to them?
This isn’t just a minor oversight. The NHSBT depends on attracting committed blood donors, especially young ones. Now they’ve galvanised the next generation, told them there’s a crisis, then slapped them down. Maybe some of those who tried for the first time to give blood last week might not try again. Oops!
What the NHSBT would say, I expect, is the blood shortage story was misreported and the problems are more complex than a simple lack of blood. They’d have a half-point. After failing to donate, I returned to the original story and found that it’s not blood donors who are in short supply but donor carers – the staff who meet and greet, insert the needles and hand out the custard creams. If there’s a lack of blood donor slots available, it’s because there’s no one to run the clinics. It’s another facet of the great mystifying staff shortage, which is a global problem, for all that FBPE types blame Brexit.
But that doesn’t really solve the mystery, and it doesn’t exonerate the NHSBT. If it’s donor carers we need, why not start recruiting them? Why not redirect the ranks of wannabe donors trying pitifully to sign up and teach them how to tap a vein instead?
A crisis in donor care isn’t like the staffing crisis in nursing or aviation. It doesn’t take a decade to train or require any previous experience. ‘There are no set entry requirements or formal qualifications to becoming a donor carer,’ say the NHS. ‘You don’t need a healthcare background or any qualifications.’
We’ve seen in the past few years that volunteers can be successfully trained and marshalled in a crisis. Millions signed up to deliver the Covid vaccine. I’d leap at the chance to be a donor carer but there isn’t any chance to leap at. The NHS is at least clear about that. After my demoralising failure to give my lifeblood, I tried to find a way of signing up to be a donor carer. Page after page on the NHSBT’s values and mission statements, and a lot on their diversity and inclusion strategy. ‘We’re working hard to ensure that we better reflect the communities we serve.’
When, in the end, I found a place to apply, it was the same story: ‘There are no vacancies in your area at the moment. Perhaps try expanding your search area?’
It might seem like a cheap shot to go on about the NHSBT diversity policy – everyone’s just trying to get by. But phrases like ‘more work to be done’, are a reliable indication of an aversion to risk. Institutionalised cowardice, we could call it, and write our own report.
It means we can predict with some confidence that it was decided in some meeting that volunteer carers were too troublesome a prospect. What if there was bad press?
The NHSBT is a vast organisation full of world-beating scientists, facilities and chocka with volunteers. Filton, near Bristol, is the biggest and best blood processing centre in the world. If you’re looking to offset despair, just read about the blood bikes, a volunteer group of mostly middle-aged men in leathers who choose in their spare time to bike blood from donor centres to hospitals. Motto: the ride of your life.
But something’s askew with the management of the NHSBT when they fail to prioritise supplying the blood which everyone, however diverse, needs to survive.
