Parkland is one of the largest users of blood products in DFW
Employee donors recognize the importance of blood donation
Colleen Bonner clearly remembers the first time she donated blood. It was 1988, and she was 17-years old.
“I needed ‘service hours’ to graduate high school, and donating blood was one of the ways for us to earn hours,” said Bonner, a licensed clinical social worker in Parkland’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “However, I’ve always been the kind of person who believes that if you can do something to help, you should. Donating blood is easy for me; I’m in good physical health and my hemoglobin runs high at times, so why not give blood to people who need it, since I have plenty of it anyway?”
As someone who works with new moms and babies, Bonner said she comes in contact with patients quite often who need or who have received transfusions including medically fragile and usually premature infants and mothers who have difficult births and lost a lot of blood. “If I can help one person with my donation, it’s worth it to me,” she added.
Jared Lange, interim vice president of Operations at Parkland, has been making regular donations for more than 10 years, but he credits his now wife with getting him started.
“My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, donates regularly and convinced me to tag along one time,” he said. Since then, Lange estimates he’s donated more than 25 times over the past decade. “It’s a quick and easy opportunity to help others. Typically, you can stop by before or after lunch and be done within 30 minutes, which is not much time or effort to help someone.”
January is National Blood Donor Month and nationwide most blood centers see a decrease in collections during the winter due to illness and/or weather-related incidents. The challenge is that when high schools are not in session, collection centers are not able to host those blood drives. The blood collected from high school drives contributes as much as 20% to the annual collections. That includes the donations made at those drives from non-students such as faculty and administration.
It is easy to comprehend the urgent need for blood when a patient is critically injured, and seconds can mean the difference between life and death. But at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the demand for blood and blood products reaches beyond just caring for patients in its Rees-Jones Trauma Center.
On any given day, patients receive life-saving transfusions for conditions such as chronic gastrointestinal bleeding or sickle cell disease, a severe hereditary form of anemia in which there are not enough healthy red blood cells to adequately deliver oxygen throughout the body. Blood and blood products may also be used during surgical cases, labor and delivery, dialysis or for oncology patients, among others. As a result, Parkland is one of the largest users of blood products in the area.
In FY 24, the total transfused blood products used at Parkland was 25,449 units, with the vast majority, 20,115 units or 79%, of those being red blood cells. The remainder was platelets, cryoprecipitate (clotting proteins to help control bleeding), and plasma.
These products are all used in rapidly bleeding patients – be it from trauma, complicated pregnancy, or other acute bleeds. Platelets, which are tiny blood cells that form clots to stop bleeding, are used predominately in oncology.
In FY 24, blood products were used in the following departments at Parkland:
- Massive Transfusion Protocol, trauma or severe bleeds, 2,723 units, 11%
- Apheresis, 3374 units, 13%
- Labor & Delivery, 3044 units, 12%
- Other areas such as oncology, dialysis, etc., 16,308 units or 64%
“It is critical that we always have an adequate supply of O-negative and AB plasma,” said Limiaa Khalifa, MS, MT (ASCP) SBB, performance improvement & patient safety specialist in Transfusion Services at Parkland, adding that the shelf life of blood is 42 days. “Those two are considered ‘universal donors,’ meaning that it’s safe to transfuse before we obtain a blood type on a patient.”
For those cases when seconds do count, Parkland stores a supply of universal donor blood in the Rees-Jones Trauma Center for patients who need immediate blood products.
Alison Leonard, director of Nursing Surgical Services at Parkland, has been a regular blood donor since her early 20s. As a 24-year employee at Parkland, Leonard said her job has had a significant impact on her decision to donate.
“Seeing how ‘normal’ it is for patients to require multiple units of blood during surgery, often uncross-matched blood, opened my eyes to the importance of blood donation,” Leonard said. “When I found out that I am O-negative, it was a no-brainer for sure.”
While blood donation is a personal choice, Leonard often encourages others to donate if they can.
“The return on investment is huge. It’s a minimal effort [to donate] with a ton of ‘feel good’ on the way out,” she said, adding that “all people, no matter the circumstance, deserve the best patient care and we are so fortunate to have the ability to provide care for those who need us. Having the ability to contribute via a blood donation is just the icing on the cake.”
For more information about donating blood, visit www.carterbloodcare.org. For more information about Parkland services, visit www.parklandhealth.org.
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