Page 1309 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 11 April 2018
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25 per cent of donations via community and organisation groups. Red25 is the group donation program of the Red Cross Blood Service, with the purpose of uniting workplaces, community groups, schools and universities around Australia to assist in saving lives through blood donation.
Since the establishment of the centralised Sydney processing centre in 2011 all blood donated within the Canberra region is transported to Sydney for processing, testing and distribution. Blood and blood products are then distributed to hospital and health facilities in the Canberra region and, for the most part, ACT blood donors provide blood products that often exceed the volume of blood products actually used within the ACT. Although this demonstrates just how extraordinarily generous the ACT community is, we know that as our community grows and the prevalence of more complex health conditions also increases as our community ages we need to do more to meet the need for an array of blood products. For this, we must continue to increase donor rates.
Innovation in the donation process and finding new ways to make donating blood and plasma more appealing is something we know the Australian Red Cross is already looking closely at. As part of this, Australia’s second dedicated blood plasma donation centre opened and commenced operations just last week in Civic. It is the second of its kind in Australia and, indeed, the southern hemisphere. With the opening of this new dedicated centre we have a very exciting opportunity for our region to be involved in leading Australia-first innovations in plasma collections. Plasma is set to become Australia’s most needed blood product in just a few years, and is used for 18 different lifesaving treatments.
Although it is understood that clinical demand for red blood cell donations is not as high as it was in previous years, the demand for treatments that use plasma-derived products is increasing by 11 percent each year. That is why the Australian Red Cross Blood Service is also urging more Australians to become plasma donors to help meet this growing demand.
Even before the new plasma centre opened the Red Cross Blood Service already had 80 donors booked in ready to donate plasma that day. And as was recently reported, one 24-year-old Canberran generously provided his 111th plasma donation that day and is one of the youngest Australians to have passed the 100 donations mark. I am pleased to note the Australian Red Cross will be trialling innovations to make the donation process more efficient.
In addressing some of the issues surrounding a reduction or elimination of discrimination in the mandatory deferral period for blood donation for gay men, as this motion notes, there have been numerous medical advances in prevention and reducing the transmission rates of HIV in recent years, specifically, as Mr Steel noted, the use of PrEP. As members might be aware, a trial of PrEP commenced in the ACT in September last year, and it is pleasing to see increased access to this highly effective prevention tool for HIV both through the trial and through its affordability, given it has now been listed on the PBS. This is a significant milestone.
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