CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) - An eastern Iowa blood center is seeing a significant shortage in donations- and staff says it is unlike any they have seen in years past.
Leaders with the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center say when elective surgeries were stopped due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, that led to a much lower-than-normal demand for blood. Now that those surgeries have resumed, they say the demand is higher than ever.
“Just three months ago was a totally different story,” said Lisa Sparrow, the donor relations manager for the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center.
At the blood center in Cedar Rapids, blood is pumped from donations to hospitals. Sparrow says between all of the blood center sites Mississippi Valley Regional runs, they provide blood to 115 different hospitals in the Midwest.
Now they are leading a call to action, with a magnitude seen a few times before.
“Some of those hospitals are telling us that we have one day supply of certain blood types, specifically O-positive and O-negative,” Sparrow said.
Dr. James Nielsen is a cardiothoracic surgeon and the Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Mercy Iowa City, and he says the shortage would directly affect doctors like himself and patients.
“We’d have to curtail elective operations and we’d also have to maybe reconsider the emergent operations and how we would handle those,” Nielsen said.
A big contributor to the shortage, outside of concerns related to the novel coronavirus pandemic, donations are primarily coming through the door. The blood center estimating they will miss out on 20,000 donations, due to a lack of blood drives.
“That’s a huge number of donors that won’t be refilling the supplies that we’d need to go on with our daily business and to take care of any emergencies,” Nielsen said.
With elective surgeries resuming, blood is in high demand in unfamiliar territory for blood centers.
“We haven’t seen that pause button ever hit before, because we’ve never had this pandemic situation quite like what we’re seeing right now,” Sparrow said.
The solution: get more people to donate, and get more groups to host blood drives because Nielsen said the need for blood can come in a variety of ways.
“Trauma can take up a lot of blood, open heart surgeries can take a lot of blood, and just the general day-to-day,” Nielsen said.
But with uncertainty on the horizon, Sparrow with the blood center says an uphill climb may be the new normal.
Sparrow said: “We want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to get the hospitals what they need so that they don’t have to think about: ‘is the supply there or not?’”
People interested in donating are encouraged to call the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center to make an appointment or visit its website for donation information.
Copyright 2020 KCRG. All rights reserved.
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Area blood centers in “urgent” need of blood, as elective surgeries resume with significantly high demand - KCRG
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