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| Blood bussed into hospital |
5 April 2006
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BLOOD required for life-saving operations is being delivered to Daisy Hill Hospital by bus, the Democrat can reveal.
The shocking news, which has been confirmed by a representative of the Northern Ireland Blood Transfusion Service, comes just weeks after the Department of Health’s controversial plans for trauma cases to bypass Daisy Hill were made public.
It has also been confirmed that the decision to use buses was taken on purely financial grounds. A source close to the Newry hospital told the Democrat that blood supplies, which are sent to Daisy Hill from the Transfusion Service’s base at Belfast City Hospital, are routinely delivered via a combination of buses, hospital transport and taxis.
All blood given by donors is processed at the City Hospital before supplies are sent out to Daisy Hill and all other hospitals in the North as and when required.
The source described the fact that blood is being delivered to Daisy Hill by bus as “extremely worrying”. “It’s not a secure method of transporting something as important as blood. The bus could crash or even be hijacked,” he added.
A spokesman for the Transfusion Service told the Democrat that the use of buses to deliver blood is “no secret”. “If the blood is needed really urgently, Daisy Hill would send their own transport down to collect it or we’d deliver it by taxi, door to door,” he said. “However, with everyday deliveries of blood to somewhere like Daisy Hill, it’s not unusual for us to put it on public transport as a cost efficiency measure.
” The spokesman denied that this appears to be a very unreliable method of delivering something as vital as fresh blood supplies.
“We have a very tight audit system and using buses has been the least problematic of all the methods we use,” he claimed.
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