Donation frequency and its association with demographic characteristics--a 1-year observational study

The aim of this study is to enhance the understanding of frequent blood donors' characteristics and devise strategies to achieve an optimal blood inventory.

Apart from donor recruitment and retention, an effective way to increase blood supply is to increase the donation frequency among donors. Understanding the characteristics of frequent donors will be helpful to impact their future donation pattern, which would in turn achieve a stable and adequate blood inventory to meet the changing demands of the society.

Demographic information of blood donors for each donation in Hong Kong (HK) was routinely collected and stored in the database of Hong Kong Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service. Logistic regression models (by gender group) with interaction effects were constructed to analyse the differences in the likelihood of being frequent donors and the associations with their demographic characteristics.

A total of 158,666 blood donors in 2010 gave 227,634 donations during the study. In general, male donors were more likely to be frequent donors. Logistic regression models further identified the characteristics of frequent donors in HK: older, blood type Rh D-ve and repeat donors, although their extent of impact was different for different gender group.

To achieve an optimal blood inventory to meet the challenge of ageing in the society, donors who donate less often should be targeted to increase their donation frequency. More efforts in promotion should be made to recruit those non-donors to join the blood donation pool and motivate 'targeted' existing donors in the population to participate blood donation more regularly.