The Irish Blood Transfusion service will run walk in clinics this week, in an effort to increase blood supply.
It comes after all hospitals were issued a 'pre-amber alert letter' on the 20th of June, restricting issues to emergency orders and patient specific requests only for the O positive, O negative, A positive, A negative and B negative groups. In addition, hospitals have been asked to reduce their stock holding of red cells to a maximum of 3 days.
St. Finbarr's in Cork will operate both appointment and walk-in donors as the service aims to get 5,000 blood donations over the next 8 weeks.
The service says the demand remains extremely high as they have issued more blood than they collected during the month of June.
IBTS Operations Director, Paul McKinney, commented on the current crisis:
"Since the start of June, we have issued more blood than we have collected as hospital demand has remained strong. We are asking regular donors who are texted this week to please attend their nearest walk-in clinic and new donors should register their interest on giveblood.ie, so the IBTS can contact them about attending a future clinic, when we are next at a location near them."
