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Donor incentives

Recently I was in a meeting with executives from US Blood Banks to talk about ways to incentivize donors. In the plasma industry the incentives are monetary, in Blood Banks it is mostly in the from of gifts like mugs, T-shirts, pins and other gifts.

The reason for the meeting was that there is increasing discussion in the blood community whether the blood banks can sustain with their model or need to adapt and consider to starting using monetary incentives.

So, what is behind this? For years, the use of red cells and transfusions has declined. As a result of that, the revenues decreased in 2 way: the revenue from hospitals went down, but also the revenue that comes from the fractionation industry. The reason is that the amount of recovered plasma (plasma that becomes available when blood donations are not used for transfusion) is reduced as well.

For the plasma protein industry, it is important to collect more plasma to meet the growing clinical need of plasma proteins, notably immunoglobulins.

We see at this moment about 2 openings of new plasma collection centers per week. Some of the Blood Banks feel that there is competition to attract donors and have used mainly 2 arguments:

  • monetary compensations make donors decide to switch from blood to plasma collection
  • Crowding Out

In this article I focus on the compensation, in another article I will focus on Crowding Out.

It is very encouraging to see that opinions are changing. There is no longer a dogmatic refusal of compensation but the realization that things need to change. Some comments were interesting:

  • Everyone involved in the collection, testing and preparation of blood donations gets a compensation except the donor.
  • The costs of donor recruitment are more than a compensation would be.

You see the same discussion in The Netherlands and France. It is more and more understood that it is unrealistic to ask a donor to travel to and from a blood bank to donate and incur costs.

I have said a long time ago that there is nothing wrong with compensating donors as long it is done in a well regulated environment.

More than 20 years ago, the German accepted the Transfusion Law that states that every donor (blood and plasma) can be compensated for their time and efforts.

Isn’t that an easy solution for other countries in Europe?

Jan M Bult
October 2019