Introduction to Blood Donors and Donation

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a discussion on the medical history and physical requirements of blood donors, the donation process, and special categories of donors. The health history questions serve to protect the donor and/or the future recipient. Donor safety questions inquire about illnesses or preexisting conditions that would put the donor at risk of adverse reactions because of the phlebotomy of 525 ml of whole blood over approximately 15 minutes. Donors are provided with educational materials explaining the signs and symptoms of AIDS and descriptions of high-risk behavior, and they are urged not to donate blood if any of the information supplied applies to them. To donate blood, the donor's hemoglobin concentration (hgb) must be at least 12.5 g/dl, or the hematocrit must be 38% or higher. This helps to ensure that the donor has adequate iron stores and that the final product will have the appropriate red blood cell (RBC) content to provide a therapeutic dose of RBCs to the recipient. There are two types of blood donation: phlebotomy and apheresis donation. In phlebotomy donation, whole blood is donated, whereas in apheresis blood components are collected by a specialized cell-separator instrument that centrifuges the donor's whole blood, separates and removes the desired component (e.g., plasma, platelets, RBCs, or granulocytes), and returns all other blood components to the donor. There are three special donor categories: directed donors, dedicated donors, and autologous donors. Directed donors provide a blood component or components for a specific, intended recipient. A dedicated donor is a directed donor who donates for the same individual repeatedly, and autologous donors are those whose collected blood is reinfused into the donor itself.