Blood Donation Intervals

Video Transcript

"Donation intervals have always been, once you donate a unit of whole blood you're deferred for, not deferred, you can't come back for eight weeks because you've got to give your body time to regenerate. Your body is going to regenerate the unit you are loosing in about six to seven weeks so the FDA requires that it be eight weeks in between donation intervals, just to make sure you're safe and ready to go and not going to hurt yourself, as I stated earlier, by donating. It is eight weeks. If you do an automated donation for red cells, that donation interval then is one hundred and twelve days or sixteen weeks, because , again, you are loosing two units of just the red cell part which most normal bodies can loose without any issues at all, but it is going to take you longer, obviously, to build those red cells back up so we've got to make sure that you're held off for one hundred and twelve days or sixteen weeks to make sure that your red cells are built back up. This automated process that we talked about, that donation interval. A lot of folks, most people only give about one and a half times a year. That eight week period is not really a big deal for them because they are only going to be back maybe, one more time this year, in a twelve month span. So people that only give once, maybe twice a year, they like the automated process also to, it builds in the barrier for them. They are only going to be able to come back three times a year or three, give three times in one year. That donation interval is there for a reason, it's for safety of the donor themselves. It has nothing to do with the patient, just the safety of the donor themselves to make sure they are ready to go and give us another unit of either whole blood two units of red cells."