How exactly does the blood donor referral process work?

I have to remind you firstly that for now we are only doing successful placements in the USA, because in Europe, for example, the vast majority of hospitals still refuse to let you choose your own blood donor. We are much closer than we used to be, but we still can’t give any dates.

To explain how the procurement process looks in detail, however, a look at the USA is quite suitable, since this will happen everywhere in a similar way. We have already mediated in various countries, but these hospitals do not want to be named for fear of reprisals. And that is why they do not appear on our lists.

You are looking for a blood donor, let’s say, for a scheduled surgery in 4 weeks. You are a member of our organization and go to the Search for Blood Donors page. There you enter your blood type, and also the country and region where you will need a donor. For example, you will get the following result:

You will find 35 potential donors in your region. You press the black “blood donor request by email” button and fill out the following contact form. There you specify your information, e.g. how urgent your request is, whether your hospital has already agreed to accept your blood donor, and submit various other details.

We will receive your message, which will be processed by us immediately, which looks like this in the back end (example photo – no real data):

Our system plots the potential matches on the map, and selects the 3-5 closest ones to notify. Depending on what you have specified in the contact form, we will contact them, or you or your hospital will contact them yourself. Generally, the hospital will contact the donors, whose blood will of course be retested before donation, as with any blood donation.

Our system is extremely accurate, so for privacy reasons, of course, we can’t show this card in the front end. You can also see here that it is extremely important that you provide your street and house number when entering the data, because otherwise the system simply cannot find you.

Please remember that especially in emergencies it is very important that you have correctly filled out and secured the living will, because only then the QR code on your membership card will lead the medical professionals directly to your living will, where the most important point is still the reference to autotransfusion, thanks to which a large part of transfusions with foreign blood can be prevented, and this is still the biggest concern of SafeBlood: The best transfusion is always a prevented transfusion. For the few remaining cases that actually require foreign blood in an emergency, we are still aiming for cooperation with private blood banks, which can step into the breach here because the mediation is clearly too slow. Initial results can be expected soon, but again not in Western and Central Europe.

If you have not yet found a clinic that accepts your free choice of blood donor, you can of course search for a suitable clinic in your region as a member: https://safeblood.net/en/medicial-partner-search/.
But don’t expect too much: In the USA we will soon add our first medical partners to this list, in Europe, Canada or Australia you will find so far practically only clinics that have not answered, or if at all, then only in a negative way. There are also other countries where we are already in talks with clinics, e.g. in Mexico, North Africa or Eastern Europe, but there everything is a bit more laid back.