Abstract

Background: In today’s modern health-care practice, transfusion medicine is an important component of it. Safe blood supply and transfusion is one of the major issues in transfusion medicine. Potential blood donors may not be able to donate blood for several reasons either related to donor’s own health or risk to the recipient. To ensure safe transfusion practice, it is paramount that all blood donors are in good health. This leads to shortage of blood donors and necessitates understanding and analyzing the cause of deferral in potential blood donors.
Objective: To evaluate the rate and major reasons of blood donor deferrals.
Materials and Methods: A retroprospective study was done to analyze the various causes of blood donor deferrals over a period of 2 years from January 2013 to December 2014. Donor eligibility criteria were followed according to the National guidelines for blood donation. Donors deferred were analyzed according to their age, sex, type of donor, type of deferral, and reasons for deferral. Result: Of 41,412 blood donors who came to donate blood, 97.44% were eligible for donation, and 2.56% blood donors were deferred. The deferral rate among male population (719/39,712 cases, 1.82%) and female population (344/1,700 cases, 20.24%) were observed. Temporary deferral was significantly more common than the permanent deferral (87.48% vs 12.52%). Leading causes of deferral were anemia (398 cases, 37.44%), alcohol intake (147 cases, 13.82%), underweight (125 cases, 11.76%), and hypertension (94 cases, 8.84%). Anemia was the most common cause of temporary deferral, whereas hyper- tension was the primary reason of permanent deferral. The leading causes of male donor deferral were anemia and alcohol intake, whereas among female donors it was anemia and underweight. Maximum deferrals were seen in the age group of 18–30 years (547/1,063 cases, 51.45%). Conclusion: Studying the profile of blood donors will help to identify selection of the donor population which could be targeted to increase the pool of voluntary blood donors and also to guide and provide the essential database for the policy design and program implementation.