Is Your Blood Supply Safe?

For as long as most of us have been old enough to donate blood, the American Red Cross has been under a federal court order to improve the way it collects and processes blood. That is because the organization repeatedly fails its reviews by the FDA. (Because it provides a critical health service, it is allowed to continue to supply blood to patients.) Unfortunately, the problems with the Red Cross do not end there. The conditions under which its workers operate are, well, just as frightening.
 
At the annual meeting of the St. Louis Worker’s Rights Board (of which I am a member), I spoke with one Red Cross employee who drives the blood vans on the East Coast. He described routinely working 16-hour days, and clocking about 96 hours per week on several occasions.
 
Obviously there are safety issues of having anyone behind a wheel for that long. He recognized the potential that he could hit another car and injure someone else. Then he lowered his voice and admitted hearing from other drivers how they have fallen asleep behind the wheel.
 
But his story gets worse. The Red Cross, he said, is supposed to send out teams of five people to collect blood. But supervisors often say, “No, just send four. The driver can step in if needed.”
 
This driver said he is only allowed to take the needle out of the arm and do the processing procedures. He received all of four hours of training to be “qualified” to do that. The staff that draws the blood does not receive much more. They are required to complete a three-day training, and often have no prior experience. That’s right—one day your Red Cross phlebotomist is working at Burger King, and three days of training later he or she is siphoning blood from your veins.
 
The Red Cross is an American icon. Its trademark red plus sign on a white background is universally recognized as a symbol of hope and aid. It operates essentially as two organizations in one. Disaster relief is operated separately from blood supply, which is the money maker for the organization. The funds brought in from the sale of blood helps support the other mission work of the organization.
 
Despite the separate branches, both sides of the nonprofit have been fraught with problems for decades--from the mishandling of 9/11 dollars to its lackluster response to Hurricane Katrina to a revolving door of CEOs leaving under clouds of scandal (the Red Cross has had 10 directors in a dozen years).
 
Mismanagement is one thing, but endangering all of our lives is quite another. Red Cross labor practices do just that. The organization supplies about 40 percent of all our blood in the United States, but what is to be done to ensure our safety? The former FDA commissioner, who made public last year the agency's concerns about the blood supply, said the time has come for Congress to intervene. Yet that has not happened.
 
Instead, complaints and concerns from workers continue to grow. The conditions under which they are forced to work lead to dangerous practices. As pointed out in a recent National Workers Rights Board report (pdf), the issues go beyond just the long hours of service such as in the example above. The Red Cross has also dramatically reduced the number of trained medical personnel on site at blood drives. And what is worse, according to the report it appears there have been instances of purposeful misrepresentation of non-medical personnel as certified nurses. The workers at the blood drives all wear white lab coats and call each other “nurse” when they are not actually RNs or LPNs.
 
The time for accountability has come for the Red Cross. I can not believe that the public at large is willing to accept such practices, especially when almost half our blood supply is at stake. The organization has made no indication it is going to make the needed changes on its own. So until Congress intervenes, my advice to you if you are having surgery is to donate your own blood ahead of time.
 
(Image by Travis Rigel Lukas Hornung)
 
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