Illinois Hospitals Running Low On Blood, Shortage Could Affect Services

From The Center Square:

By Cole Lauterbach

Illinois’ health care system is “critically low” on blood and an official said it could affect the availability of non-emergency procedures if it gets worse.

Jim Watts, president of the Illinois Coalition of Community Blood Centers, said levels of available blood in hospitals are the lowest he’s ever seen.

“It’s just completely different now,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of days where we’ve had less than a one-day supply or maybe a two-day supply of O negative or O positive and some other blood types as well. That puts us in a situation where we have to make sure there’s enough blood on the shelf. It could, potentially, look at delaying surgeries at hospitals and things along those lines. Obviously, that’s not a situation we want to be in.”

As of Wednesday, no Illinois hospitals had publicly announced any restrictions on non-emergency procedures.

The Illinois Department of Public Health has deemed blood drives an essential activity, thus not restrained by the governor’s executive orders. While IDPH and the governor’s office have the ability to restrict what procedures hospitals can offer, they said on Tuesday that those decisions are up to the hospitals.

“Each hospital monitors its resources as each hospital has different needs in terms of trauma centers, birth units, surgical areas, etc,” a spokesperson for IDPH said in a statement.

Generally, if there is a shortage, they said community blood banks would contact the hospitals and the department. At the request of the blood banks, IDPH could send an alert to hospitals.

With the COVID-19 related shutdowns, many businesses don’t have workers in their offices. That means they’re not holding in-house blood drives, a major source of blood donations. Companies often invite a nonprofit like the Red Cross to set up shop inside of a common area and offer the convenience of giving blood without leaving work.

“We’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands of blood drives canceled,” Watts said. “A lot of them are the businesses where employees are working remotely. It’s different where you can walk down to the conference room and give blood versus making an appointment and drive across town.”

Watts said the organization is looking for parties interested in hosting blood drives.

For more information about donating blood or hosting a blood drive contact the Red Cross or the Illinois Coalition on Community Blood Centers.

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