So, how long until someone figures out that they don't actually need to save someone's life to send a text message? And what about using the blood when someone's life is not saved, does that not warrant a text message?
How come the entities using the blood and/or distributing it have access to the phone numbers of the donors?
I'd hope that would get you arrested in short order and held until you come up with a very good and verifiable explanation about where the blood came from.
Who donated the blood is important at the point of capture, where you want to analyse the blood and make sure that neither the plasma nor the cells carry anything other than benefits to the eventual recipient.
But who exactly sourced the blood should be of no concern to the agency that ends up using it, and if there is a problem the only thing they should have to go back on should be an un-identifiable serial number that they can use to report back to the collection agency to make sure they destroy the rest of the blood from that lot and mark that particular donor as un-acceptable.
What should happen beyond that is up to the local legislation, presumably the donor should be warned and the screening process should be improved so a similar thing will never happen again, if a problem with blood products is only discovered at the time of use then that's a process failure much more than a problem with that blood.
>try turning up at ha hospital with a bag of blood
I have Rhnull and that is the only way I would donate my blood, ever. My mom (who also has this type) has been looked down as a emergency bag of blood on a few occasions and living with that is terrible experience.
There's nothing in the article that says they do. They say they get a message from the blood collection agency when they donate and another when their blood is used.
I imagine it works pretty much as you suggested below: each bag of blood is identified with a serial number, the collection agency is alerted when that bag is used, this triggers a message from them to the donor.
The title is misleading. As I understand it from the text and photo of the sms (i don't speak swedish), messages are sent when the blood is used. It doesn't say whether it saved somebodies life or not.
In the US, the entity that collects the blood can have a lot of requirements to notify the donor about and report infectious disease, so they are required to maintain records about the donors. They also generally happen to be the entity that distributes the blood.
I would guess that the implementation has the hospital passing a list of numbers read from barcodes to the blood center and then the center either sending the messages or passing phone numbers to the county council mentioned in the article.
How come the entities using the blood and/or distributing it have access to the phone numbers of the donors?