(Montreal) The number of young people donating blood has been declining in Quebec for the past five years, which represents a challenge for Héma-Québec, which must continually make efforts to successfully fill its blood bank.
As the population ages, some donors, sometimes regular ones, retire from donating blood for all sorts of reasons. For example, if they start taking certain medications that exclude them as donors or if they are struck down by an illness.
Hence the importance of having a succession of donors, because the needs are not decreasing. In Quebec, every 80 seconds, a person needs blood and to meet this demand a minimum of 1000 donations per day must be collected.
In 2018, young people aged 18 to 29 represented 31% of registered donors. Five years later, there has been a drop of 10 percentage points, meaning that 21% of donors are under 30, according to the most recent data from Héma-Québec.
Among new donors, that is, any adult who decides to give blood for the first time, Héma-Québec observed a significant drop during the pandemic, but has since recovered.
In 2018, the organization that manages blood collection in Quebec reported that 22.4% of registered donors raised their sleeve for the first time, and this rate dropped to 14% at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, one in five registered donors is preparing to give blood for the first time.
It is important to have “new blood” every year to ensure the sustainability of the supply, explains Josée Larivée, spokesperson for Héma-Québec. This is also necessary to secure the organization’s capacity to meet the demand of hospitals.
Our blood bank in Quebec is doing relatively well. We are still quite happy, we can be proud of the generosity of Quebecers, but when we look to the future, we say: 18 to 30 years old, we have to get on board. We have to ask ourselves why we are not giving blood and if we could try to become a new donor.
Josée Larivée, spokesperson for Héma-Québec
Mme Larivée said that currently, the weekly demand from hospitals “sometimes slightly exceeds our daily collections… so much so that the reserve is dwindling, a situation that we are addressing through appeals for donations.”
However, summer is a precarious period since appointments are more difficult to fill, partly because of the holidays.
Mme Larivée said that Héma-Québec favors vigilance, which has allowed the non-profit organization to never run out of blood in 25 years of existence.
She is also encouraged by the 400 more Quebecers than usual who decided to make a donation during National Blood Donor Week, which ended on June 16.
Lifting of restriction
Since December 2023, it has been possible for people who have stayed in France, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s to donate blood. The lifting of this ban linked to the Creutzfeltz-Jakob criterion, better known as mad cow disease, has made it possible to include new donors.
However, many people who knew they could not donate blood because of this criterion self-excluded themselves. Héma-Québec can therefore hardly accurately measure the impact of the lifting of the restriction related to mad cow disease since it only has data from people who were refused the opportunity to donate for this reason.
Among donors who had a prior prohibition related to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, 943 distinct blood donors registered for at least one blood donation between December 2023 and June 2024. Some donated more than once and together these donors contributed to 1,208 registrations for blood donation.
For the same period, there were 157 separate plasma donors who contributed to 547 registrations for plasma donation.
Héma-Québec is continuing its blood drives across Quebec. It has not launched a call for specific blood groups, but reminds us that group O negative is a universal donor, which is essential for emergency relief.
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