Whole Blood Donor Deferral Causes in a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital Blood Bank from South India

The safety of any blood transfusion begins with the proper selection of donors. The physician must take care that removal of blood does not harm the donor and that the potential risk to the recipient due to disease conditions in donor must be kept to minimum. All blood donors should be in enough good health to be able to tolerate a short period of hypotension and bradycardia that occurs due to removal of blood. Donor should also be free of known recurrent diseases so that a coincidental exacerbation of disease cannot be attributed to blood donation. Suspension of eligibility of an individual to donate blood or blood components resulting from self administered questionnaire, interview responses or medical evaluation is called deferral. This could be temporary wherein the donor is deferred for a specific period of time or permanent wherein the donor is deferred from donation indefinitely. Analysis of donor deferral is beneficial in helping us in refining our donor screening methods and criteria [1]. It helps in providing efficient blood transfusion services as well as throws light on health status of the catering population. This was a cross sectional study designed to delineate the causes for deferrals amongst whole blood donors at a single tertiary care referral hospital blood centre in southern India. Methodology