Waterbrook Bible Fellowship will once again be hosting a blood drive to address the severe shortage of blood in North Texas medical facilities. This blood drive will be held Sunday, October 3rd, 2021, on the Waterbrook campus from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM. Appointments may be scheduled by clicking the button below. Walk-ins will be accepted if spots are available on the day of the event.
With origins in the 1950s, Carter BloodCare is one of Texas' largest blood centers, providing over 440,000 units of life-saving blood and blood components to patients in North, Central, and East Texas annually.
However, the past year+ of shortage has impacted the medical community in Texas and the nation.
“We’re just barely meeting the needs on a daily basis, once you start to see even a small decrease in donors coming out" said Veronica Moore, vice president of organizational relations at Carter BloodCare. "It's a significant impact on the hospitals and the patients they serve.”
Prior to the pandemic, centers like Carter BloodCare would rely on businesses, schools, religious centers and communities to host blood drives on a regular basis. When the pandemic abruptly shut these places down, blood donation drives also took a hit.
“Once the pandemic started, then all those businesses and opportunities where we normally host drives, they closed, and they closed very quickly,” Moore said. “And so, since then we’ve just had a challenge with you know, searching for different ways to really just get the community involved to remember, hey, there are patients out there.”
Blood donations are usually used in cancer treatment procedures, orthopedic surgeries, organ and marrow transplants, and treating blood disorders. The American Red Cross speculates about 36,000 units of red blood cells are needed every day in the United States.
While it's always been a challenge for blood centers to get folks to donate blood, this year has been especially challenging.
“We normally see that we're able to overcome it. But this one, it just continues to persist. So we've never, I've never seen anything like this. There's other individuals in the blood industry that over 30 years, that’ve never seen the shortage persist for so long,” Moore said.