Team:JNFLS/Silver Human Practice

Silver Human Practice

June 14th is the World Blood Donor Day, the theme in 2018 is “Give blood to others and share life.” In order to response to this meaningful day, our team members decided to take place in some voluntary activities, so we chose to go to the local blood donation bus just near the Quancheng Square in Shandong Province.

We went there on that day. Although there were many people on the square, there were not many people in the blood donation bus. After asked the staff working there, we started to work. Our job was to help the donors to fill the form before donation, record the donor’s information in the computer and put the blood bags in the fridge, etc.

Not only we helped a lot, but also learned that there are some detections must be performed before the blood donation. They are as follow:

• Blood type of the donor
• Hemoglobin quantity
• ALT detection
• HBV antigen and Treponema pallidum antibody

These detections are really important, if one of these items is not qualified, the donor cannot donate their blood. These tests are just primary detection, the blood needs to be sent to the blood center for further detections, including HCV and HIV detection.

But now the question is that not all of the virus infected blood could be detected. If the infected blood is during “window period”, it cannot be detected due to the limitation of technology. If those undetected blood in the “window period” are transfused to the patients, it would increase dramatically the risk of virus infection, such as HCV, HIV, etc. This is very dangerous. So, we got an idea that if we develop a method to detect the infected blood in the window period, that would be very significant. This is the original intention of our project.

For deeply understand the unpaid blood donation, our team members went to the blood donation bus again at the beginning of summer vacation and we did some survey concerning the blood donation. It was upset that there were still a few people at the blood donation bus during the holiday. So we went to the local bookstore near the square and science museum to give out the questionnaires regarding the knowledge of blood donation. We gave out about 200 questionnaires and collected some data as below.

1.From the first question, we found that not too many people know the items must be detected exactly, most of them just heard about two or three of them.

2.From the second question, we knew more than half of the public don’t know any about the window period. We thought this could be the normal phenomenon because this word is a kind of specialized.

3.The third question can reflect that only a small number of people know about the benefits of blood donation, most of them were just heard a little bit about it before, even some people think that blood donation is bad for their health, we were really concerned about this opinion.

4.The fourth question is about whether healthy people would like to donate. We first thought that there would be a large number of people would like to join in the blood donation. By contrast, the result was not as optimistic as we thought. There are only one-third of the people would like to do so, and most of the public just not so sure about it or even totally refused.

From these results, we found that not so many people know about the blood donation well and there still was a large number of people held some perceptions. We started to think that maybe the shortage of blood supply mainly caused by the prejudice appeared among the public.