What keeps blood from
reaching people in time.
Twelve critical gaps stand between a patient in an emergency room and a donor willing to save them. Pashtoonkhwa Blood Bank was built to bridge every single gap across Balochistan.
Poor research and data
Almost nothing is measured. Without records of who gives, who needs and where the shortages fall, every decision is a guess.
No national blood group database
There is no register a hospital can search. Finding an O− donor at two in the morning still means phoning down a list somebody wrote by hand.
Very little voluntary donation
Most blood is given by a relative under pressure on the day. Regular, voluntary donors - the people a blood bank can rely on - are rare.
Blood-consumptive disorders
Thalassemia, haemophilia and the rest need transfusion every few weeks for life. Two hundred children depend on PBB alone.
Prescribing habits
Whole blood is often ordered where a single component would do, and transfusion is sometimes prescribed where it is not needed at all.
Blood bank capacity
Screening equipment, cold storage and trained staff are concentrated in a few cities. Smaller towns work with far less.
Blood discarded
Bags expire on a shelf in one town while a patient waits in the next. Nobody can see both at once.
Everything routed through the cities
A family in Sherani or Musakhel travels to Quetta for something that ought to be available in their own district hospital.
No respect for the donor
Somebody gives blood, hears nothing again, and does not come back. The single cheapest fix in the entire system.
Little government attention
Blood services are largely left to charities and welfare societies to fund and run.
Everyone works alone
Blood banks, hospitals and welfare societies each keep their own list. None of them can see the others.
Getting the donor there
A willing donor forty minutes away with no transport is, in practice, no donor at all.