Q&A with South Bend Medical Foundation CEO Tim Travis
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January is National Blood Donor Month, and as the month comes to an end, the city of South Bend is facing a blood shortage that is also being felt throughout the country.
The American Red Cross earlier this month said it is experiencing the lowest amount of blood donations in the last 20 years, with the number of blood donors falling 40% during that time period.
The South Bend Medical Foundation is working to find ways to bring the number of blood donors back up, particularly among the younger generations.
President and CEO Tim Travis spoke with Inside INdiana Business on what needs to be done to attract new blood donors to help address what he calls a national crisis.
What is the South Bend Medical Foundation all about?
The South Bend Medical Foundation has been in existence since 1912. We are primarily a pathology laboratory that does any type of surgical cancer diagnosis that comes from all of the area hospitals, both the Beacon facilities and the Trinity facilities, as well as some hospitals that are a little further out of the area, including up into Kalamazoo, the Borgess health system there. And then the other side of our business is a blood bank and blood donation. So we provide blood for essentially all of all of the Michiana area, and we’ve done that for for many, many years.
South Bend has been dealing with a blood shortage recently. How do you hope to address that?
The blood shortage is not something that is unique to South Bend Medical Foundation; this is a national crisis at this point, and we’re we’re managing it from a day-to-day perspective right now. I was just on a call and email back and forth yesterday on on the levels of blood in the area and trying to try to make sure that we’re utilizing that with a great deal of prudency. The only real way to solve it is by more people donating blood.
What we are trying to do here is understand with our donor population aging and no longer being able to donate, how do we get the younger generations involved in blood donations? How do we reach those individuals? What essentially makes those younger generations tick? There’s some you can ask to just come donate, and they’ll do it just because you asked. But others, is it education? Is it something else that motivates them? I have a 17 year old, and we send him text messages, and he gets a text message on his phone. It says, ‘Go donate,’ and he’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll be there,’ and he actually donated on his birthday. But that’s his motivation, and I’m glad that he’s that kind of kid that you can just tell them, but are there are there other things that we can do as an organization to reach these people that are either not donating because they don’t know the need? We need to find out what motivates them actually do so.
How are you looking to try to solve that issue?
We’ve done a lot of surveys. We’ve engaged a marketing company to also help us try to rebrand some of that messaging, and we know that target market that we’re missing is the under-50 population, and then as you go down to the time when people are able to start donating, which is 16 years old, the numbers just decrease as you go down the age scale. So, it’s been a matter of surveying to find out what those people need to donate and what their motivations are and then changing our messaging to adapt to that.
What are you hearing from hospitals and other medical centers that need this blood and how they’re trying to cope with the shortage?
As as we stand right now, we have been able to just barely continue to meet the demand that the hospitals need. There are some some wants that they’re not getting. We’re not getting nearly as much O Negative or Positive blood as we could, which is the blood type that is most most useful in the hospital setting, particularly with any type of emergency situation.
But what we’re what we’re coming up to now, just within the last couple of weeks, particularly with the weather that we’ve had up this way and people not being able to get in to donate is the conversation shifting toward at what point do we have to make the tough call of canceling elective surgeries? When do we get to that point? We’re trying very hard to not get to that point, but that usually calls for us purchasing blood from outside of the area from essentially anywhere in the United States that would have the blood types that we need. That’s not only very costly, but it takes time to get that here.
As we end the month of January, which is National Blood Donor Month, how important is that education, not just throughout the month but the entire year, especially to get younger folks in?
This being Blood Donor Month, it’s unfortunate that this month has also been one of the worst months that we’ve had for blood donors coming in. And I know part of that’s to blame for the weather, but it is important that this message goes out to folks at the at the end of Blood Donor Month and that people don’t lose focus on how important it is.
If people would hop on to our social media, we have stories of people who have received multiple units of blood that have saved their lives in the area. It may not be your friend or family today, but it most certainly could be tomorrow. No one ever expects a tragedy to happen in their lives, but unfortunately it happens every day. And it’s a regular occurrence that we’re sending blood to particularly Memorial Hospital, which gets a lot of our trauma on a weekly basis. We’re sending lots of blood products there for for them to treat these individuals.
You can learn more on how to donate blood through the South Bend Medical Foundation by clicking here.