Officials with Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville are urging the public to donate blood amid a critical shortage of type O blood.
Dr. Joe Conway, laboratory medical director at NGMC Gainesville, said the Red Cross recently cut their standing order for blood by about 50%.
"The real critical product that we're not getting is the O red blood cells, which we use for a lot of the trauma resuscitations," Dr. Conway said. "We're below the minimal level that we like to keep on hand, which is 68, and we're running in the 50s, and we like to keep in the 120 to 130 level of those products."
Dr. Conway said that while the supply of blood is stable at the moment, any major trauma could quickly wipe out that supply. There are typically seasonal shortages of blood during winter and summer, but he said the issue is compounded by a rebound in travel from the COVID pandemic.
"The American Red Cross told us it would be three months at a minimum to get back to normal from where we are now," Dr. Conway said.
O- and O+ blood types are particularly important, as O- blood is considered a universal donor.
"If you have an emergency, somebody is brought here, they don't know anything about them, we can resuscitate them with O-," Dr. Conway said.
While O+ is not quite as universal as O- blood, Dr. Conway said it is used for most of the traumas that they encounter.
Dr. Deepak Aggarwal, chief of staff at NGMC, said the community has stepped up in the past during times of low blood supply.
"We really need them to step up now, along with our employees, to donate blood," Dr. Aggarwal said.
Anyone interesting in donating can visit the Red Cross website to find the nearest blood drive.
In the meantime, NGMC is making several concessions to attempt to conserve blood during the shortage.
"One thing that we're doing is for routine transfusions, we're just doing one unit at a time." Dr. Conway said. "So people get just what they need, there's not any wastage."
