Willingness to donate blood has fallen significantly due to the corona pandemic

04.05.2022 12:40

The current calls for blood donations underline how scarce blood is at the moment. A new study by the University of Hamburg shows that the willingness to donate has decreased significantly during the pandemic. The results were published in the specialist journal “PLOS ONE”.

Even before the corona pandemic, blood donation services repeatedly called for donations to bridge bottlenecks. The constantly changing demand for blood products due to the pandemic as well as the requirements imposed by the pandemic have further complicated the supply mandate of the blood donation services. While acute disasters often lead to an increased willingness to donate, the current study shows that the intention to donate blood fell significantly overall during the pandemic.

This shows that the willingness to donate of active donors - i.e. those who have donated blood at least once in the past 24 months - was less affected by the pandemic than that of inactive donors who have already donated once, but not in the past past two years. Values from 2020 and 2019 were compared. Between April 2020 and June 2020, around 1,500 people between the ages of 18 and 75 were surveyed in six rounds across Germany. An online study conducted in April 2019, which is based on the same questionnaire, serves as a comparison value.

“Our results show that active donors had an increased awareness of the fact that they could donate at the beginning of the pandemic. However, as the pandemic progressed, they felt significantly less able to do so,” explains study leader Prof. Dr. Michel Clement, Professor of Marketing & Media at the University of Hamburg. Among the inactive donors, this awareness was significantly lower and willingness also fell more sharply.

“During the pandemic, everyone was constantly exposed to the risk of becoming infected or infecting others and therefore had to severely restrict their public and private lives. This presented an unforeseen individual and social challenge,” explains Besarta Veseli, the study’s lead author. Such factors could significantly reduce the perceived responsibility to behave prosocially, for example by donating blood. Both active and inactive donors would have felt less morally obligated to donate blood.

“Since many non-essential operations were canceled at the beginning of the pandemic, the blood donation centers were able to secure the initially reduced demand for blood through the commitment of active donors in particular,” adds Clement. But over the course of the pandemic, the reduced willingness to donate blood has again become a major challenge for society, which now makes increased blood donation calls necessary again.

The authors of the study, which was carried out as part of a research collaboration between the University of Hamburg and the DRK blood donation services of Baden-Württemberg-Hesse and Northeast, emphasize that only continuous awareness among donors can sustainably secure the blood supply. In particular, retention strategies should be established to retain new donors and turn them into active donors.

Original publication

Veseli B, Sandner S, Studte S, Clement M (2022) The impact of COVID-19 on blood donations. PLoS ONE 17(3): e0265171. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265171