Meeting of the Parliament 05 November 2014
I join my colleagues in congratulating Jim Eadie on bringing the debate to the chamber; I congratulate the Edinburgh Ahlul Bayt Society on its work to encourage Muslim residents in Edinburgh and the Lothians to donate blood; and I welcome to the chamber those already mentioned by Jim Eadie—particularly my friend Shabir Beg, who I see sitting at the back of the gallery.
The Imam Hussain blood donation campaign, which, as has been mentioned, seeks to increase the number of regular blood donors from Muslim communities, already appears to have been a great success. Tying the campaign to the memory and the work of Imam Hussain seems to have worked; indeed, I am delighted to hear that Glasgow, too, has begun to hold donation sessions. Too often, people who do such small charitable acts do not see the bigger picture about what that half hour out of their lives has done when, in fact, it has saved lives.
I will repeat a statistic that Mr Eadie mentioned, because it is crucial to the debate. Over the course of a year, a woman could save up to nine adult or 21 children’s lives, and a man could save up to 12 adult or 28 children’s lives. I am particularly touched by the statistic that three teaspoons of blood can save the life of a premature baby. My partner works with premature babies every day, and that figure really brings home how, even from a distance, we can help some of those tiny little children to survive.
As the campaign says,
“Blood is a precious resource which can benefit others and save lives.”
That is an extremely powerful message. We need 5,000 blood donations every week in Scotland just to keep up with demand and given that, as we know, blood has an extremely short shelf life, the stream of donations needs to be constant. As a result, the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service runs alongside its regular donation schedules a project called blood donor 24, which is Scotland’s emergency blood donor response team. The team is made up of folk who have pledged to respond within 24 hours should the need for a donation of their blood group arise.
As Jim Eadie pointed out, shortages in blood types can arise for many reasons; there might be a bank holiday, for example, or a major incident or emergency might happen. Of course, finding donors can sometimes be easiest when there is an emergency. Who can forget the queues of people stretching around the block from the Glasgow offices after the Clutha Vaults tragedy? So great was the response that the service had to ask people to delay their donations for a couple of weeks, because it had too much blood.
However, despite our instinctive recognition of the importance of blood and the number of lives that can be saved each year by blood donations, it is still the case that, as has been mentioned, only about 4 per cent of eligible blood donors donate. We all have to work on that.
The blood transfusion service is working on getting younger people to become donors. Recent research shows that only 46 per cent of 17-year-olds are even aware that they could give blood. It is crucial that we engage with young donors, because the average age of donors in Scotland is now over 40.
I know that 20 per cent of new donors come from the give blood school talks programme, which signed up 5,000 new volunteers last year. Its message to people is to celebrate their 17th birthday and celebrate saving a life. That work is extremely important. I will contact the service to see whether we can engage in other ways with young people on giving blood, perhaps through working with youth groups and sports or arts centres.
The blood transfusion service’s work is critical to the excellent blood donation service that we have in Scotland. That service will get even better when the work to construct the bespoke national centre is completed. The national centre will provide a flexible and modern pharmaceutical industry-standard environment for the service’s staff to continue to deliver a safe and efficient supply of blood components across Scotland. That will also provide an on-going contribution to our leading life science research and development industry.
I congratulate the Imam Hussain blood donation campaign on the work that it is doing to get more Muslims to donate blood and I congratulate the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service on its work to ensure that blood is kept safe and used efficiently. I look forward to working with the service to see how we can encourage more people to take part in that simple but life-saving act.
17:31