When You Need a Transfusion

Can My Family and Friends Donate for Me?
Sometimes friends, relatives or parents ask if they can donated blood for a specific patient. This is called a directed donation. Puget Sound Blood Center offers directed donations as a medical service when ordered by a physician. If you are considering directed donations, there are several issues you should take into account.

There is no medical or scientific evidence that blood from directed donors is safer than blood from volunteer, community donors. In fact, some evidence suggests that blood from directed donors is less safe, in part because directed donors may feel pressure to donate and may fail to completely disclose their health or social history for fear of exposing aspects of their lives that they may want to keep private.

Certain adverse effects may be more likely to occur if blood relatives are used as donors.

• Immunologic reactions due to undetected antibodies can occur when blood is transfused from mothers to their children.
• Transfusion from blood relatives may increase immune system impairment.
• Risk of graft-versus-host disease, a fatal transfusion complication, is higher with transfusion from a blood relative, despite the fact that blood from all directed donors is irradiated to help prevent this complication.
• If you can’t store your own blood for surgery, community volunteers are the safest source of blood for transfusion. Donor screening procedures and laboratory testing nearly eliminate the risk of infectious disease transmission.

Also, keep in mind that:

• because of the additional clerical and administrative tasks involved with directed donations, a processing fee will be collected for each directed donor unit. Many insurance policies do not cover this fee.
• directed donations are not available for emergency transfusion. To ensure availability, there should be four weekdays between the donation and scheduled transfusion in King County, and six weekdays in hospitals outside King County.
• directed donations not used by the designated patient will be discarded. They will not be made available to other patients.