Drawing Blood for Blood Donations

Video Transcript

"When you are actually donating, there's two things that are going to happen. We're going to put this blood pressure cuff on your arm, and it?s going to put pressure on your vein to keep it dilated to make sure that we can still get a blood flow. And then we're going to have you hold this hand gripper. Through the donation it?s good to squeeze it every three to five seconds or so or do a continuous roll. This makes sure that your blood stays steady and that you'll finish in the time limit which is fifteen minutes. If you keep a nice rolling and squeezing motion you shouldn't have any problem with finishing. For a whole blood donation we have digital scales that weigh each unit of blood. Here's one of them here. So we would put our blood bag on the scale like this. So what this scale is going to do, its going to rock back and forth. There's and anticoagulant in this bag that we want the donors blood to mix with, to make sure that there's no clots. So when we start it rocks back and forth like this. And then on the top it has a digital readout of how much it weighs at any time. The collection goal for this is 565 grams, now that's including the bag weight. So that?s about 475 grams of blood, or one pint of blood. When its done and it hits 565 its going to ring and clamp, so then we know, then we know when the donor is finished."