Giving blood is an act of goodness. How tragic if it became a casualty of Covid...
DONATING blood is one of the loveliest things we do, and one of the most frightening. I suppose that is why I have been doing it for more than 50 years. I started in the days when they collected it in imperial pints, and donors lay in silence on iron beds with grey blankets in church halls, tended by starched nurses of the old school.
I was never offered a postdonation pint of stout, as some claim happened to them in those days. But I was given iron pills, a procedure now regarded as rank heresy.
Now I go to smart, cheerful donor centres, with fancy reclining chairs, electronic bleeps and music, with no starch to be seen and the actual blood measured in annoying millilitres. They insist that I consume vast quantities of water (a drink I positively dislike) before undergoing the procedure. But at heart it is the same thing.
The great social scientist Richard Titmuss said rightly that blood donation is a rare example of pure unselfishness in action, which has nothing to do with markets or gain or even enlightened self-interest. People just give blood because they want to help others, and for no other reason.
It is not in any way a commodity. You get nothing material out of it, except perhaps a cup of tea, a few custard creams and a nice badge after 25 donations. Alas, the tea has now been abolished for some obscure Covid-related reason.
It was Titmuss’s argument, in his 1970 book The Gift Relationship, which took me for the first time to a blood donation clinic, half a century ago, when I was a revolutionary Marxist. And it still keeps me going there, as often as I reasonably can, now that I am a conservative Christian.
And I urge anybody who can (and I know some cannot) to do the same. You will be very glad that you did, precisely because you get nothing out of it for yourself.
In our normal lives, well, mine, at least, of selfishness, impatience and of passing myself off as nicer and kinder than I really am, here is a deed of pure unmixed goodness.
It hurts a bit, but not much. It takes up quite a bit of time. It requires you to undergo the most extraordinary interrogations about your sexual habits and intravenous drug use, assuming you do either of these things (and they have to assume this for safety’s sake, as I fully understand).
If anyone offered to pay me for it, I would fling the money back in their faces hard enough to hurt. And this brings us to the danger. All blood donation nowadays is haunted by the fear of contamination, thanks to the horrible results of disease-ridden blood products, brought into the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, which transmitted hepatitis C or HIV to recipients.
The diseased blood products came in many cases from people in America who had been paid, including prisoners and habitual intravenous drug abusers. This tragedy perverted what should have been an act of mercy into an unforgivable crime and misery, and I find it impossible even to think about this scandal (still not fully resolved) without becoming furious.
But you can see why the NHS blood transfusion services have since become ultra-cautious about whose blood they accept.
Alas, I think it has made them too cautious.
In the years when I used to travel a lot, my blood was often refused because I had been in some perfectly clean and healthy country where there were, even so, small pockets of disease miles from where I had been. This happened so much at one stage that I drifted away. But then came Covid.
Now, the thing about blood donor clinics is that although the uniforms and the equipment make them look like hospital wards, everybody at them is healthy, and most are young. It’s a most unlikely place to catch an illness. If there is anything seriously wrong with you, you can’t give blood anyway.
And while I can still donate at 70, many can’t or prefer not to.
So when Covid came along, at first I went happily to donate and was welcomed. Then, as the panic deepened, the English blood service started insisting on face coverings. I disapprove of them, and I cannot tell you how many attempts I made to get them to compromise over this, or all the things I offered to do to help such a compromise.
What fascinated me was that at that stage of the pandemic, the Welsh Blood Service actively disapproved of face coverings.
Donors sometimes faint, and staff are trained to spot the signs that this is going to happen – these are shown round the mouth, and a mask makes them much harder to see.
So to avoid the silly unreasonable busybodying in England, I travelled to sensible Wales to give blood in Newport, and was made very welcome when I did so.
I had the impression that the English service had gone overboard on Covid, and when I finally managed to go back to my favourite London clinic I noticed that it was sometimes very quiet and that a fine new extension had been taken out of use.
Were the recliners also further apart, meaning slower processing?
Perhaps. I also caught a whisper that staff absences were more of a problem than they had been.
So when news came last week that the NHS Blood and Transplant service was running short, I was not especially surprised.
If people are asked to give, and able to make appointments quickly at convenient locations, you will always be able to collect blood in this country.
But the actual collection is more complicated. You need quite a lot of skilled people, ‘donor carers’ and nurses to collect each pint
The cup of tea has now been abolished for some obscure reason
I suspect the service lost all sense of proportion in the panic
(actually only 470ml these days – a pint is 568ml).
They must check the complex questionnaires, test iron levels, insert and remove needles, supervise donors in case they run into trouble, make sure people are who they say they are (yes, this is apparently a problem) and pack and store the donated blood.
The more absences there are among staff, the fewer patients they can handle.
So you may not be able to get a quick appointment, and the one you have may be cancelled.
Like much of the state system, and the NHS, I suspect the blood service has lost all sense of proportion since the Covid panic, so that people stay at home thanks to positive tests that mean little and not much is done to encourage them to get over this.
Many who stayed away from work during the panic may well have decided not to return.
I am all in favour of caution and care in collecting blood, just as I am in favour of reasonable care in controlling disease. But I think we went too far over Covid, and have not got over it.
That is why a rich and wealthy country faces the real risk of a blood shortage in our hospitals.