Your blood could save someone with a life threatening disease

With blood donors in serious decline for a decade, NHS Blood and Transplant now needs 204,000 new volunteers to come forward in England and North Wales this year to keep blood stocks at a safe level for the future.

Donated blood can be used to help save lives in different but vital ways. As well as being crucial for emergency situations and during surgery, donor blood is needed for patients with cancer and for people with blood conditions, including sickle cell disorders and thalassemia.

These diseases are more prevalent within the black and South Asian communities, in which some blood types are more common and some rarer sub-types only found.

To highlight the challenge, each month hospitals request between 3,000 to 4,000 units of red cells to meet the needs of sickle cell patients.

While the NHS is always able to provide suitable blood for patients, there are certain sub-types among sickle cell patients that they can only fully match half of the time. June 14th is celebrated all over the world as World Blood Donor day, please let us join hands to make blood donation a reality.