Blood Match

Blood-match-availability: Donor recruitment and retention in minority populations.

Donors matching patients who are negative for common blood group antigens, or who have an uncommon combination of alloantibodies are most likely to be found in ethnic minority populations. For example, certain rare blood types (e.g. U-, Fy-(a-b-)) are more common in populations from African origin. Like in many countries, minority populations are underrepresented in the Dutch donor population. Barriers that are often mentioned by members of minority populations include religious and/or spiritual beliefs, lack of knowledge about blood donation and medical practice, distrust toward the transfusion practice, feeling of social exclusion or discrimination, and fear. So far this knowledge has not been used to target recruitment strategies on. In the Netherlands, a broad variety of ethnic minority populations exist, but frequencies of their blood types may differ from textbook knowledge due to evolving and mixing of subpopulations. This highlights the need to increase the variety of blood types in our donor base by 1. identifying ethnic minority populations to focus on in terms of rare blood type prevalence and 2. subsequently developing effective and efficient recruitment and retention strategies for these specific populations.

The primary objectives of the proposed study are twofold:
2.1. Analysis of blood group antigen frequencies in Dutch ethnic minority populations.
2.2. Development, implementation and evaluation of effective and efficient recruitment and retention strategies for ethnic minority populations that are most relevant in terms of rare blood type matching.

Secondary objectives are:

• To identify which specific ethnic minority populations should be focused on, tuning the prevalence of blood group antigens with the need for extensively typed products following preventive blood type matching strategies and calculations of the donor pool needed for cost-effective supply of typed blood products.
• To gain an understanding of why specific minority populations (as identified in the previous secondary objective) do not currently donate blood and/or stem cells, and identify specific beliefs, motivators and barriers for each population.
• To systematically design and (pilot) implement targeted strategies to recruit blood donors from these minority populations.
• To follow new donors from these populations throughout their first donation experiences, systematically adapt existing retention strategies and prevent lapsing of newly recruited donors.
• To calculate a cost-benefit analysis of the recruitment strategies.

Blood Match – Availability will start in September 2014 and will run for 4 years.