Donated blood ‘thrown away’ since centre closed

HUNDREDS OF litres of donated blood have been thrown away since a processing plant in Sheffield closed, it has emerged.

The manufacturing department at Longley Lane blood centre, near the Northern General Hospital – where donations are separated into their constituent parts – closed at the beginning of September.

Services provided there and at a plant in Newcastle, which also shut as part of NHS cost-cutting measures, are now carried out at a single site in Manchester. NHS Blood and Transplant, which runs the service, has revealed 520 packs of red blood cells were discarded in the three weeks after the Sheffield facility closed, due to issues with how donations arriving there were handled.

A standard donation of blood is 470ml and the discarded packs came from across the region now served by Manchester.

The blood service claims problems are being ironed out and did not affect supplies to hospitals, with more than 30,000 units of red blood cells being processed during the same period.

But one employee said: “Those people who have given their time for free to donate blood will not be happy so much has been discarded.”

Greg Methven, NHSBT’s director of manufacturing and logistics, said: “There were delays with processing some donations at the Manchester blood centre after we first consolidated processing from Sheffield.

“We’ve made changes to how we work and the issues are being resolved.”