How Automated Blood Drawing Machines Work

Video Transcript

"So what we just witnessed was a whole blood donation, which is the standard or regular type of donation which most people are familiar with. There are other types of donations that we can do which are automated donations or automated blood collection also known as Apheresis. With technology, we can remove specific components of peoples blood. That way, they can donate at different intervals instead of whole blood donation. We can target specific blood types and collect products from specific donors. For example, we have machines that can collect your platelets, your plasma, your red blood cells or a combination of the three. The most common is apheresis donation is a platelet donation. Now what happens is, we remove your blood, your whole blood and it is centrifuged. That way we can remove the platelets only and we can return the rest of the components to you while you're donating. When we remove a specific component, we can take more of it safely. So platelets, if you were to collect them from a whole blood donation, you would really only get a small amount, so we really need these automated blood collectors so we can remove a large amount of platelets so we can get more than one transfusable unit from one donor at one time. The other types of automated donations are the red cell only or the double red cell or the plasma donation. Plasma, we really shoot for a specific blood types. So, its the opposite with plasma than it is for red blood cells. While o-negative is universal, red blood cell donor, A-B positive is the universal plasma donor. So people who are A-B positive, we want them to donate their plasma and we have a new procedure where we can take two transfusable units of plasma from a donor in one sitting. They can also donate one transfusable unit of red blood cells during that sitting also. So if you're type-O, we want your red cells because they can be used for many different patients. We have a procedure called a double red cell donation where you can donate two transfusable units of red blood cells at one time. The other benefit of these automated machines is that they do a step that our lab would normally do for us. So they separate your blood while you're donating it. So after we finish a procedure, we have the blood that's already separated and now it just needs to be tested for infectious disease and can be sent to hospitals and used very quickly. So this is really kind of the way of the future for blood donation. We don't need whole blood always because whole blood is never actually transfused, its always separated and specific components are being given to platelets, so we have machines that can do the separation process for us and save us that step in our lab. We will be able to provide more units at a quicker pace for our clients, the hospitals."