Friday, January 17, 2025
Inside an outdoor shed beside Masjid Hamza, a tight space usually reserved for prayer and storage, Nayyer Zubair sat at a foldable white table laden with syringes, sterile needles, and coiled tubing. He knew the value of the blood he was about to give.
“To start chemotherapy, my mother needed four bags of blood last year,” he said. “It’s personal for me.”
Blood is a vital fluid with near-constant demand from hospitals and emergency medical facilities. Yet experts note this is one of their hardest recruiting times due to a holiday season lull, which can create an unnerving situation for blood banks if supply needs go unmet.
The Takeaway
- Blood banks face critical shortages during the holiday season, relying heavily on community drives to meet the daily need for 2,000 units of blood, especially Type O-negative and platelets.
- Hospitals are economizing blood use through evidence-based programs like "patient blood management" as donation rates struggle to recover to pre-pandemic levels.
- Recruiting young, healthy donors is vital as older contributors age out, with community efforts encouraging the next generation to sustain the blood supply.
“Donating blood is really not on the top of people’s list of things to do,” said Doreen Fiscina, manager of business development at New York Blood Center. “This is one of our most critical periods where we see our donations significantly decline between the holidays.”
Zubair, who coordinated with the New York Blood Center to set up its blood drive at his hometown mosque, said more than two dozen of his fellow congregants gave blood. Stalked by the risk of shortages, Fiscina says these community drives prove immensely valuable for the blood bank system. Every donation counts.
“We have to ensure that we collect a minimum of 2,000 units of blood every day to ensure that our collections for the hospitals are at a safe level,” said Fiscina.
Spelled out in more concrete terms, that’s enough blood to fill about 250 standard soda bottles, with some blood types in higher demand than others. Demand, Fiscina noted, is especially high for Type O-negative blood, the universal donor, and platelets.
Anxieties around the reality of blood collection are unlikely to fade anytime soon. Five years after COVID-19, the regional community blood bank has languished to restore donation rates to pre-pandemic levels. In the wake of this, Dr. Alexander Jose Indrikovs, a pathologist at Northwell Health and senior director of blood transfusion services, says its hospitals have learned to economize with the amount of blood they receive from NYBC.
“We have a program called patient blood management,” said Dr. Indrikovs. “We take care of the patient in a way to make sure that we only transfuse those who need a transfusion, and we give them what they need when they need it based on evidence-based practices.”
Blood donations are used in all manner of medical procedures in hospitals, noted Indrikovs from blood loss caused by traumatic accidents to organ transplants to chemotherapy treatments. “The purpose of consistent blood donations is to keep a healthy and robust inventory of blood components to be used in a split second when they’re needed in a hospital or ambulance,” he said.
Dependent as patients are on blood donors, experts worry long-time contributors are becoming a dwindling breed. The need for fresher blood, quite literally, continues to grow particularly against Long Island’s aging population.
Indrikovs used himself as an example. At 66, he has continued to donate blood at every opportunity, but as he gets along in years, there is an increasing risk of developing a disease or being put on certain medications that disqualify him from giving blood.
“That’s why we need to continue recruiting young people who are healthy, who are not taking medications that we have when we age,” he said. Zubair recruited his 14-year-old son Hamza Zubair, a South High School student, to volunteer at the Masjid Hamza blood drive to “show the importance of this kind of community service” and encourage the younger crowd to participate.
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