A walking donor program for an intensive care nursery.

Repeated transfusions of small increments of blood are frequently required for the sick newborn infant to correct endogenous hypovolemia and/or to replace blood obtained repeatedly for monitoring purposes. Current practices of blood banks are rarely geared to supply the small amounts of blood used for these individual transfusions. To provide a more efficient system, a walking donor program was established in which an appropriate hospital-based individual is cross matched as a donor for an infant for the duration of the infant's hospital stay. The program eliminates wastage of blood and donors and reduces the number of infectious agents to which the infant may be exposed.