Increasing demands on today's blood donors.

Recently in Northern Ireland there has been a rapid increase in demand for a variety of blood components. To meet this need a large proportion of routine blood donations must be processed at the Transfusion Centre. In addition, several blood components are collected direct from donors by apheresis techniques. Apheresis is currently restricted to the collection of components from highly selected donors, but in future this method is likely to be employed for collection of some routine components. This changing pattern is placing increasing demands on many of our blood donors.