Alarming drop in blood supply across the North Coast

A combination of increased blood usage at hospitals, more stringent federal restrictions on who can donate and a typical summertime blood shortage has led to an alarming drop in supply in the North Coast and across the country, blood services experts said Monday.

And recent consolidations in the blood service industry also may have had an impact.

Blood Centers of the Pacific, which serves a region from San Francisco to the Oregon border, through northern Nevada and down to Merced, is currently about 3,000 pints below its ideal inventory of 30,000 pints of blood it needs to provide every month.

“Summer is a bad time for blood banks,” said Dr. Thomas Jackson, pathologist and medical director of Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital’s laboratory services, referring to the single biggest cause of the current shortage.

With large numbers of people on vacation during the summer, blood drive events at places like schools, businesses and churches become far less frequent, said Jackson, a local expert in blood banking. But, he said, “the people who actually need blood, that doesn’t have a seasonal component, that doesn’t let up in the summer.”

On top of the summer slump in collections, a significant increase in blood usage by hospitals has also led to a drop in supplies, said Nicole Anderson, regional director of Blood Centers of the Pacific. Hospitals in the blood bank’s region are expected to use about 500 more pints of red blood cells this month than they did the same month last year.

The reason for the increase is unknown, Anderson said.

“We’re a little at loss as to why that’s happening,” she said.

Anderson and Jackson said new donor restrictions also have affected the regional and national blood supplies.

For example, those who have traveled to a country where there is active transmission of the Zika virus must wait 28 days before they can donate blood, said Kent Corley, a spokesman for Blood Centers of the Pacific.

In addition, Anderson said, a new rule by the Food and Drug Administration regulating the level of iron in donated blood has led to a 1 to 2 percent increase in the number of men who are ineligible to donate. The decrease in supply is “more than we normally see seasonally,” Anderson said.

Corley also pointed to the impact recent consolidations in the blood service industry have had on local efforts to promote blood collections.

At Blood Centers of the Pacific’s 14,400-square-foot building on Bethards Drive, the scene is typical of blood collection operations. Donors sit in reclining chairs having their blood drawn or are hooked up to apheresis devices that separate out blood platelets.

But past the building’s blood collection and reception areas are rooms that reveal the dramatic effects of recent blood bank mergers. The building’s local laboratories, where blood was processed and tested after being drawn, and a once-bustling call center, where staff reached out to local residents to remind them of their civic duty, are all but empty. The rooms instead are filled with unused desks, office equipment and stacks of file boxes.

Those operations were consolidated in San Francisco when Blood Centers of the Pacific, the Bay Area’s largest blood bank, absorbed Blood Bank of the Redwoods. The move came three years after St. Joseph Health ended its 60-year relationship with the local blood bank and contracted with Blood Centers of the Pacific.

Earlier this year, Blood Centers of the Pacific merged with Sacramento-based BloodSource. The two entities will keep their organization names and continue to serve their communities in Northern and Central California. Both operations are now part of Blood Systems, a Phoenix-area nonprofit blood collection organization that serves more than 700 hospitals in 24 states. Blood Centers of the Pacific had been affiliated with Blood Systems for the past 15 years.

Such mergers have been taking place across the country, Corley said, standing in the empty call center. Local outreach and community blood drives have been affected by these consolidations, he added.

But Anderson, Blood Centers of the Pacific’s regional director, said the mergers that essentially emptied out the local blood bank’s call center and lab “haven’t had a dramatic effect” on collections. She pointed to the increased blood usage by regional hospitals and seasonal demand as the real cause.

Each week, Blood Centers of the Pacific and its partner blood centers need at least 8,000 donors to meet the regional demand from about 100 hospitals throughout the Bay Area, Northern and Central California and northern Nevada, as well as international customers. What’s more, blood donations since Memorial Day have been extremely low, Corley said.

The shortage has the blood bank appealing to the public to donate.

On Monday, Phyllis Passantino, 75, of Santa Rosa visited the Blood Centers of the Pacific complex on Bethards Drive in Santa Rosa. Passantino said she’s been donating blood all her life, though she was forced to take a “cancer break” for about 25 years. Some people are not allowed to donate blood for a certain period after cancer treatment.

Passantino said many people in her family donate blood and she’s not sure why others wouldn’t.

“It meets a need that can only be filled by people donating blood,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com