Abstract:

Background: Blood donation is a vital part of worldwide healthcare. It allows for blood transfusion as a life-sustaining and life-saving procedure. The role of blood transfusion services also ensures adequate availability of safe blood via donors that are in good health. Although a person can voluntarily decide to donate blood, they may be disqualified from donating blood due to reasons pertaining to the donors’ safety and/or recipient safety, which are simply referred to as donor deferral. It occurs when donors do not meet the eligibility criteria for donating blood when visiting their blood donation sites. Deferrals could be temporary or permanent. Temporary deferrals denotes that the prospective donor is deferred based on removable, time bound factors such as low hemoglobin, while permanent deferral implies that the prospective donor have non-removable, long lasting factor such as possibility for any of the TTIs.

Methodology: A retrospective cross-sectional study has been conducted between March 2023 and March 2024 at the blood centre of BMC, Mwanza by records extraction from the donor registry. Simple random sampling from a computerized system was used to obtain data. IBM Statistical Package for Social Studies (SPSS) program version 25 was used to analyze the data.

Results: The study showed 20% of all people who came for blood donation were deferred. About 73% of those deferred had a temporary cause and 27% had a permanent cause. Of all temporary causes, low hemoglobin was the leading cause; contributed 33.1% of all causes of blood donor deferrals while STDs was the second leading cause of temporary blood donor deferral, carrying about 17.5%. Of all permanent deferrals causes, hepatitis B and C were the leading causes. It contributed about half of all deferrals (49.8%). HIV was the second leading cause of permanent deferrals accounting for 26.1% of all deferrals.

Conclusion: A significant proportion of blood donor deferrals has been reported in the present study, that accounted for the inadequate supply of blood for transfusion. Transfusion transmissible infections are the leading cause of permanent blood donor deferrals where hepatitis and HIV forms the highest proportion of infections. Low Hb is a leading cause for temporary deferral. There is a need to improve blood donor recruitment plans by increasing awareness of the people on blood donation and the causes for deferrals. Mass education on hepatitis is important so as to increase awareness of the population and ultimate prevention of hepatitis, specifically, HBV and HCV.