Vlad (32 years old), IT analyst for a multinational bank, has been a blood donor ever since 2007. At that time, he says, the Bucharest Blood Transfusion Centre looked awful, and the entire donation process, from verification and blood-work, to the donation itself, could have taken up to four hours. “Now it doesn’t take more than an hour”, Vlad says.
For Vlad, for the 5,000 people who donate blood every month through the Bucharest Blood Transfusion Centre and, most importantly, for the thousands, tens of thousands of salvaged human lives, Vodafone Romania and REACT Association have restored and transformed this Centre into a space equipped with cutting-edge machinery and up-to-date computer technology.
In order to realize what Vlad meant when he qualified the Bucharest Blood Transfusion Centre as awful, we will only say this: in 2012, when the reconditioning works began, the building had not been renovated since 1952.
The blood is only viable for maximum 30 days, and the thrombocytes extracted from the blood, extremely necessary for leukemia patients, have a life span of only four days. Those valuable moments were cut short even further with this centre having not been modernized, Anca Ştefan declared for us, as president of the REACT Association.
The cost of the renovation
During the course of this year, the modernization works for the 1st floor of the building were finalized, where the pre-donation specialty consultations area, the medical offices and the post-donation blood work area are found. The Blood Transfusion Centre’s new space now provides the donors with an optimized circuit, which reduced the pre-donation time by 50%.
The value of the renovation, equipment and furnishing works for the 1st floor is of 110,000 euros, out of which Vodafone Romania has donated 103,000 euros, and React Association has contributed with 7,000 euros, owing to the 2% redirection of the community’s income tax.
Vodafone Romania has been involved in blood donation since as early as 2008, when it launched the “A chance for life” program, which has contributed, up till now, to the saving of over 150,000 people and has improved the country’s transfusion centres’ annual reserves by more than 70,000 liters of blood.
The total value of the investment Vodafone Romania made towards the renovation and equipment of the Bucharest Blood Transfusions Centre amounts to 137,000 euros. With this sum, the following have been accomplished:
- The 1st floor of the Centre has been renovated (the donation consisted of 103,000 euros)
- The ground floor has been refurbished (the donation consisted of 23,000 euros)
- An ambulance was donated in 2010, for delivering the blood processed in the Bucharest Centre to the hospitals and patients in the capital (the amount of the donation was 11,000 euros)
- Overall, REACT Association contributed to the reconditioning of the Centre with 17,000 euros, raising the total value of the investment to 154,000 euro.
About blood donation in Romania
– The Bucharest Centre collects blood from around 5,000 people every month.
– In Romania, approximately 2% of the population donates blood, whereas the European average is 10%.
– According to the law, blood donors in Romania receive, upon request, seven meal tickets, a day off from work and a 50% discount on public transportation passes, for a month.
