Health professionals push for more blood donors during trauma season

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) - Medical health professionals say this weekend is the beginning of trauma season.

The time of year when more people are doing a lot of outdoor activities, and more accidents are likely to happen.

Those accidents eventually lead to the need for more blood donors. However, there’s a problem. The Kentucky Blood Center (KBC) says during the summer holiday season, the number of donors declines because people are busy doing those outdoor activities.

“I don’t think it’s any secret, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen an uptick in violence and gunshot wounds same vein as traumas related to car accidents or anything else. Those can often take a lot of blood to help a patient. I mean, we are talking anywhere from 50 units to a hundred units of blood, and those are things, obviously, you can’t forecast. You don’t know when that’s going to happen, but in order to save those patients, we have to have blood on the shelves when it comes,” said the Director of Media and Branding at the Kentucky Blood Center, Eric Lindsey.

Lindsey says right now, the blood supply at KBC is not great.

“which is a little worrisome heading into a holiday weekend,” said Lindsey. “We currently have a low supply for B-, B+ A-. We are always in need of O- donors.”

KBC knows it’s a holiday weekend, and they expect donor numbers to decline now and throughout the summer, so they have a program called the Save Our Summer campaign. It’s 16 days of donor appreciation days to get people back in the chair.

25% of blood donations from KBC go to cancer patients, and that’s trauma season or not.

Nationally only 3% of Americans give blood.

KBC says they’d like to have 400 donors a day. In 2022 they saw 275 donors a day, but they tell us this year, those numbers are trending up.

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