The Weekly Download: She minds pints, drives group toward goal
Lauren Dillard
Issue date: 5/18/07 Section: News
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All right Erika, So how was the Blood drive this year?
The blood drive this term, which is the spring term blood drive, has been going really well, actually. We've made over goal the first two days, and the third day we were under our goal only by three units and so far we are a total of 43 units over our projected goal. Monday our projected goal was 168 units, Tuesday it was 190 and Wednesday it was 240 and on those days we collected 184, 221 and 237 units, respectively. It's been really well and we are really pleased with the way today is going. Our goal is actually 240 units for today, but as of 3 o' clock so that's with one hour left of the drive we have had 300 people come in to try and donate blood. So they've presented to donate. We usually have a little bit of a deferral rate - just because people don't have enough iron or just have to unfortunately leave to go to class or something before they can actually donate blood. So, we are hoping to be over goal and that would be really exciting for us - our second time this year.
You said that you were over your goal for two of the four days, do you set daily goals to try and match your total goal of the blood drive for the week?
Yeah, actually the American Red Cross sets our goals for us. They take the different terms in the past - so we do it term by term, so last years spring term is what we are comparing this years spring term drive to and we try and just determine if we think we've had more participation this year and sort of maybe how many nurses are available is how we set our goals. We are actually over already what we collected last year, these goals are actually set by the American Red Cross. And they also kind of help them to see how many nurses we need each day, so if we have a higher goal we need a higher number of nurses to help collect the blood.
For the Civil War blood drive, do we, in general, beat the University of Oregon?
Yeah, we've beat UO every time that I've been here and every time that I've heard stories of. They said that this year they are going to try and really compete against us and really try and beat us but we have a feeling that that won't happen and we are looking forward to beating them again.
You talked a little bit about donors not being able to donate because of low iron counts. I know that its pretty frequent that women have lower iron counts than men, for example. Is there any way that people can boost their iron counts before they want to donate?
Actually, that is a true statement. Usually women have a harder time having a high iron count when they donate blood. I myself have been deferred numerous times because of low iron and this drive I kind of put myself on a little program the week before the drive and ate a lot of foods that are iron rich and those included red meat and they include dark green vegetables - so like asparagus and spinach and things like that. Especially if you are a vegetarian it's important to eat those dark green vegetables. And wheat products, like oatmeal and cream of wheat have tons and tons of iron and those are the easiest ways to get a lot of iron just before you donate. So the week before and the week of you should definitely work on eating those things. And also fruits - Raisins are always a good pick because you can take them wherever you go.
What is the percentage of donors that can't give blood because of a low iron count?
We usually have about a 20 percent deferral rate. We always make it a goal to have it lower. Yesterday, we had about 20 people who were unable to donate.
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