Blood transfusion practice: state of the art on promoting blood donation in Italy
Journal Title: Biomedicine & Prevention - Year 2017, Vol 2017, Issue 1
Abstract
Blood transfusion is considered an important Public Health issue worldwide. One of the main global challenges is to obtain adequate supply of blood, in order to guarantee the national self-sufficiency. According to the WHO agreement, a self-sufficient country is a nation where an average of 20-25/1000 inhabitants regularly donate blood. This quantity corresponds to 40 blood units per 1000 inhabitants. Since 2010, Italy has been a self-sufficient country. However, data from the 20 Italian regions showed that sufficient blood donations are lacking in 4 of them, resulting in a shortage of blood for transfusion. Moreover, data from the National Institute of Health pointed out a significant difference among contributions from different age ranges of donating population, showing on the one hand a striking predominance of donors aged between 30 and 55 years old. Therefore, on the other hand, young donors (i.e. subjects having 18-35 years old) only contribute for roughly around 31.67%. This tendency, associated with the negative trend of the demographic transition, could cause a remarkable reduction of around 4.5% in Italian regular donors in 2020. In this review, we highlighted how the Italian national case study presents non-uniformity in the distribution of the age ranges of blood donors. Thus, public health planning interventions are essential issues to be tackled in order to improve and homogenize the participation of the population to blood donation. In particular, promoting blood donation in young people could guarantee a generational turnover of donors.
Authors and Affiliations
Chiara Grecuccio, Mariacarmela Ferraro, Marco Colafelice, Gaspare Adorno, Giuseppe Liotta, Sandro Mancinelli, Leonardo Palombi
Keywords
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- EP ID EP334964
- DOI 10.19252/000000059
- Views 135
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