Staff crunch hits blood centre at NBMCH

The Regional Blood Transfusion Centre at NBMCH. File picture

TT, Siliguri, Oct. 24: The Regional Blood Transfusion Centre of North Bengal Medical College and Hospital is facing difficulty carrying out the blood component separations because of shortage of technicians at a time cases of dengue have been reported from several districts.

Mridumoy Das, the director of the transfusion centre, said they had six technicians when the requirement was of around 15.

"We have been facing a shortage of technicians for over a year. The RBTC has to handle a vast range of work such as collection of blood, conducting tests on them, making digital entries in order to keep a record and attend blood donation camps. But the number of technicians currently is insufficient," Das said.

The RBTC official said the technicians were facing difficulties in carrying out the process of blood component separation.

Blood component separation is a process in which the constituents of blood such as platelets, fresh frozen plasma and concentrated red blood corpuscles are separated.

In a region where dengue cases are reported daily, the demand for platelets goes up.

It is mandatory for blood banks to do this as stipulated by the National AIDS Control Organisation.

NACO, the apex body under which all blood banks of the country function, has stipulated that component separation should be carried out in 80 per cent of the blood units collected every day. However, the transfusion centre is able toperform component separation only on 20 per cent of the total blood collected each day.

"It takes a lot of time and the technicians are not able to dedicate enough time to conduct component separation. So, we have not been able to comply with the NACO guidelines," said Das.

"We have approached the state health department several times for increasing the number of technicians at the transfusion centre but so far, there has been no development in this regard. If situation remains the same, it will be hard for us to perform blood component separation," he added.