Can My Family and Friends Donate for Me?
Sometimes friends, relatives or parents ask if they can donated blood for a specific patient. This is called a directed donation. The Puget Sound Blood Center offers directed donations as a medical service when ordered by a physician. If you are considering directed donations, there are several issues you should take into account.

There is no medical or scientific evidence that blood from directed donors is safer than blood from volunteer, community donors. Some evidence suggests that directed donors are less safe because of greater hepatitis risk. Directed donors may feel pressure to donate and may fail to completely disclose their health or social history for fear of exposing aspects of their lives that they may want to keep private.

Certain adverse effects may be more likely to occur if relatives are used as donors:

• Immunologic reactions due to undetected antibodies can occur when blood is transfused from parents to their children.
• Transfusion from close relatives may increase immune system impairment.
• Risk of graft-versus-host disease, a fatal transfusion complication is higher with transfusion from a relative.
• Community volunteers are the safest source of blood for transfusion, except for storing your own blood for surgery. Donor screening procedures and laboratory testing nearly eliminate the risk of infectious disease transmission.
• Because of the additional clerical and administrative tasks involved with directed donations, a processing fee of $150 will be collected for each directed donor unit. Many insurance policies do nor cover this fee.
• Directed donations are not available for emergency transfusion. To ensure availability, there should be four weekdays between the donation and scheduled transfusion in King County, and six weekdays in hospitals outside King County.
• Directed donations not used by the designated patient will be discarded. They will not be made available to other patients.

To plan directed donations, contact the physician who will prescribe your transfusion. Your physician will complete and order form. You will be asked to sign a consent form that explains the risks of directed donations, and you will need to provide a list of people you would like to donate for your transfusion.

For more information call the Blood Center's Transfusion Information Line, at 206-292-1840.