Concerns as Migori county blood bank runs dry

Patients prescribed for blood transfusion in Migori County are staring at imminent death as the region’s blood bank runs out of stock.

Officials from the local blood bank at the county referral hospital said lives of patients requiring blood transfusion in local health facilities are threatened by the big shortage of blood due to the low blood donation trend by the local population.

At a critical meeting this morning with one partner in blood collection campaigns in the region, the Rotary Club of Suna Migori, an in-charge of the Migori blood satellite Gideon Ombima painted a sorry situation of a deficit of 5,000 kits of blood to date.

With a population of about 1.2 million people, Migori requires to collect 1,000 blood kits every month, a total of 12,000 kits per year, to address the ever-emerging high demands of blood to save the lives of patients in the area.

“Yet from January to date we have only collected 7,000 pints of blood, out of which a big number has already been used, leaving a gap of 5,000 kits to fill the deficit for us to sit well with the emerging blood transfusion cases,” Ombima said.

The official who was with a colleague Evans Richa said Migori is one of the six blood bank satellites within the Nyanza region that are listed to feed the Kisumu–based bank with at least 500,000 kits of blood every year.

“So far the major undoing to the blood bank stocking is the low number of people volunteering to donate blood even when a serious campaign is conducted within the Nyanza region and, especially within Migori County,” Ombima said.

While appealing for more partners to come on board in supporting blood collection exercises in Migori, the official cited Lwala Medical Centre and the Rotary Club of Suna Migori as great partners have collaborated with the blood bank centre at the Migori referral Hospital to save lives.

Ombima said other challenges dogging the local blood satellite were a lack of refrigerated rural health facilities to store blood due to limited dependable electricity, the lack of adequate funds to carry out more blood donation exercises and, vehicles and staff to facilitate more blood donation forums.

He denied claims the centre has been selling donated blood leading to the huge shortage of the commodity, dismissing the claims as rumours meant to taint the names of the staff.

At the same time, he refuted claims that patients have been transfused with ‘bad’ blood within the region, leading to health complications.

“We are running a digitised system that is able to screen blood properly and track a unit of blood from the donation point to its final destination of transfusion to a patient,” Richa said.

“All the rumours doing rounds about blood theft and safety are just street talks meant to divert attention from the real problems by those peddling them.”