Despite recent American Red Cross warnings about a dire national blood shortage, Texas has sufficient blood flowing into its medical facilities thanks to the strength of its local network, says the chair of the Texas Medical Association’s panel on blood transfusion-related matters.
Nevertheless, blood donations are always welcome, and physicians should encourage patients to roll up their sleeves and donate.
“I’m not aware of any of blood centers in Texas having to go to the level of reducing the amount of blood that they provide for patients,” Bedford pathologist William S. Crews Jr., MD, chair of TMA’s Subcommittee on Transfusion and Transplantation, told Texas Medicine Today.
In mid-January, the Red Cross raised alarms about a “national blood crisis,” saying the shortage was its worst in more than a decade. The warning cited low donor turnout dating back to August 2021 and the emergence of the delta and omicron variants of COVID-19.
“Supplying 40% of the nation’s blood, the Red Cross has had to limit blood distributions to hospitals in recent weeks. In fact, on certain days, some hospitals may not receive as much as one-quarter of the blood products requested,” the Red Cross said in its January statement.
While that 40% figure makes the Red Cross by far the nation’s largest blood provider, Dr. Crews said, the rest of the nation’s donated blood comes from independent, local community blood centers. He said the Red Cross has more of a national focus and may ship the blood it collects from one part of the country to another.
In the Lone Star State, the focus is on collecting local blood and keeping it local.
“And in Texas, we have a strong network of those community blood centers,” he explained. “We just wanted to make sure that that message from the Red Cross wasn’t going to be conflated with the local blood centers here in Texas.
“I don’t want the message to be that we’re doing fine with our inventory. But we’re definitely not at the crisis level of telling hospitals, ‘I’m sorry, I know you were expecting 50 units of blood. Tomorrow, we’re only going to maybe give you 30 units.’”
To make sure Texas doesn’t experience the same shortages other regions are having, the Subcommittee on Transfusion and Transplantation is encouraging TMA physicians to urge patients and other health care workers to schedule regular blood donations, rather than only doing it intermittently in response to disasters.