Taking Action to Increase the Diversity of Blood Donors

September is Sickle Cell Awareness Month and National Hispanic Heritage Month began on September 15th. This makes September a great month to highlight the efforts Carter BloodCare has made to recruit and increase the diversity of our donor base.

In the November/December 2021 edition of Blood Matters, I wrote about the importance of increasing the number of diverse blood donors at Carter BloodCare. Since then, we have worked to renew a campaign we first implemented in 2016 to recruit R0 donors. The campaign will kick off later this month that includes antigen typing select donors for the R0 phenotype, sending an email or mailed postcard to donors with the R0 phenotype informing them their blood type is in popular demand, and encouraging them to visit our dedicated webpage to learn more and schedule an appointment for another donation.

Currently 7% of our donors have an R0 phenotype, so increasing the diversity of donors is important to this campaign for two main reasons. First, 44% of African American donors have an R0 phenotype. Increasing the number of African American donors provides the best opportunity to increase our percentage of R0 donors, thereby increasing the availability of R0 red cells for distribution to hospitals and patients. Second, more donations from African American donors should reduce the reagents and time used to manually screen RBC units to fill orders for R0 red cells.

We are working to increase the number of Hispanic donors, as well. Hispanic Americans make up 40% of the Texas population, but only 18% of Carter BloodCare donors are Hispanic. To increase our percentage of Hispanic donors, Carter BloodCare has improved our efforts of reach Hispanic donors by creating a Spanish-language webpage. We also recognized National Hispanic Heritage Month on our website, acknowledging the impact Hispanic donors can have on increasing the O blood inventory.

We design Spanish language advertising and materials to promote blood donation and encourage the hosting of blood drives. To increase our number of multilingual staff, we partner with Spanish-language media company Univision, advertising our open jobs on their news station and through their social media channels.

As we observe the effectiveness of these campaigns in the coming months, we hope to learn, improve and expand upon their reach. By doing so, we can grow and sustain our efforts to have the diversity of our donor base more closely reflect the diversity of our communities.