Stanford Blood Center’s Special Donations department is a small office of four cubicles. A large whiteboard takes up an entire wall of the room, and is covered in meticulous handwriting in a rainbow of colors. A good portion of the board is devoted to a numbered list of patients and their blood type. The #1 spot is held by a long-time patient undergoing regular transfusion therapy for sickle cell disease. This patient has a very rare antigen, and requires a specific phenotype match for transfusion. Next to the patient’s name is another name – a donor’s name – and this top row hasn’t changed in years.
“When the patient comes in, we call the donor, and she comes in, too,” says Lupe Alcantar, Special Donations Specialist. “She is the only donor we can get blood from for this patient. She keeps her alive.”
This is just one example of the work done by the Special Donations department. The job of this trio is to find the right product (red cells or platelets, for example) for the right patient at the right time. To do this sometimes requires matching donors to patients based on phenotype (for red cells) or HLA type (for platelets).