The Safe Blood Transfusion Programme (SBTP) organized a joint workshop, on May 05, 2018, with the global social media giant ‘Facebook’ to introduce a new Pakistan specific Feature to promote voluntary blood donations in the country. The Facebook Feature will be launched in Pakistan and globally. The workshop participants included the representatives of the Blood Banks and university based Blood Donor Organizations (BDOs) from Lahore.
Facebook last year launched a special Feature in India to promote voluntary blood donations and later in Bangladesh. Facebook launched a similar Feature in Pakistan which aimed to link the people who need blood with the people who can donate blood. So far more than 8 million blood donors have registered themselves on the Facebook Feature in these three countries. In the last two months SBTP and Facebook have coordinated closely and come up with a new modified version of the Facebook Feature which will be launched soon. This new Feature is fully consistent with the national strategy and the international recommendations. The new Feature will aim to directly link the people want to donate blood with the blood centers and the BDOs. This Feature will also include the locations and contact details of the partner Blood Centers and the BDOs to facilitate the donors to access centers in their vicinity.
Prof. Hasan A. Zaheer who is the pioneer of the German government funded Safe Blood Transfusion Project shared the achievements of the SBTP with regard to the promotion of the culture of voluntary blood donations in Pakistan. He informed that since its establishment in 2010 the SBTP has done a lot of spade work to lay the foundations of voluntary blood donations in Pakistan. These efforts include the development of a National Blood Donor Policy, increasing and participatory celebrations of the World Blood Donor Day, regular seminars and capacity building workshops all over the country, development of promotional material and message dissemination through website, e-newsletters, annual reports and print, electronic and social media. The National Blood Policy recommends the conversion of Family Replacement Donors to Regular Voluntary Donors and strengthening of the Blood Donor Organizations in addition to creating a general awareness among masses about blood safety and the significance of voluntary blood donation in it.
The SBTP is developing a nationwide network of new infrastructure of blood transfusion funded by the German Development Bank KFW. This includes establishment of 10 modern Regional Blood centers and up-gradation of 60 existing hospital blood banks. This new infrastructure has now become operational and will be the biggest beneficiary of the new partnership between the SBTP and the Facebook since reliance on voluntary blood donations is the key to the success of the blood transfusion reforms process.
The Joint Workshop with Facebook included a technical session in which the Facebook team namely Ayesha Hammad and Hammad Yousad briefed about the details of the new Feature and how to use it. The Facebook experts also made demonstrations on how to create a Facebook page through which a blood bank or a BDO can connect to the Facebook registered blood donors. Earlier, the SBTP team briefed the participants on the status of voluntary blood donations at the global and national levels and the SBTP achievements on the implementation of the blood safety systems reforms in Pakistan.
Based on the experience of this pilot meeting, SBTP will organize similar meetings in other cities and try to institutionalize the use of the Facebook Feature for the promotion of regular voluntary blood donations in Pakistan.
