The National Social Security Fund (NSSF) in partnership with Uganda Blood Transfusion Services (UBTS) have kicked off a blood donation drive to collect over 3,000 units of rare blood types currently in high demand in hospitals.
Barbra Arimi, NSSF Head of Marketing & Corporate Affairs, said the blood drive will take place in selected areas within Kampala, Hoima, Masaka and Jinja between 19th and 21st June. She said the initiative is part of the Fund’s corporate social responsibility agenda focusing on health.
“The drive initially in Greater Kampala, Hoima, Jinja, and Masaka, will be expanded to other parts of the country. From our discussions with UBTS, we learned that there was a scarcity of the rare blood type – the negative rhesus, in hospitals and we would therefore like to specifically scale up donors with that blood type within the next three days and beyond,” she said on Monday, 19 June 2023.
Adong Juliet, UBTS Principal Assistant Secretary, said: “We have collected less negative blood types on average, compared to the positive blood type despite the high demand of the latter. In general, patients with Rh-positive blood groups can receive blood from either RH- negative or Rh-positive blood groups while patients with Rh-negative can only receive from Rh-negative blood donors. Specifically, for O-ve blood group, which is the universal donor, we usually receive only 1% of that blood type from our collections on average. We believe that an increase in Rh-negative blood donors will help us avert death that would arise due to lack of the rare blood types.”
Arimi said the Fund has enabled UBTS to collect over 62,288 units of blood in the past ten years of the initiative, thus saving over 187,164 lives through transfusion of safe blood.
In addition, she said, the Fund donated a preservative centrifuge to UBTS in 2021 that supported Mbarara Regional Blood Bank Laboratory Services and a number of refrigerators for safe blood storage, this was for purposes of sustainability of this initiative.
A centrifuge is used for processing blood into various blood components including platelet concentrates mainly for cancer patients, red-packed cells for anaemia and fresh frozen plasma for maternal cases.
