Blood Supply Up Slightly but Still Short : Some Area Hospitals at Crisis Level, Stocks Sufficient at Others

Some Los Angeles and Orange County hospitals showed a slight increase in blood supplies Thursday, but many still have less than a day’s supply of type O and type B blood on hand, hospital spokesmen said.

In Orange County, the Red Cross reported the blood shortage “as bad or worse as it was yesterday,” but officials of some local hospitals said they have yet to experience the shortage.

Crisis Rated a ‘9’ “It’s still filtering down, even though we’ve been in a critical situation for three days,” said Dr. Benjamin Spendler, head of blood services for the Orange County Red Cross. “In some cases, they haven’t yet felt the pinch.”

However, at UCI Medical Center, Spendler said, the crisis “couldn’t be much worse. On a scale of 1 to 10, they say it’s a 9.”

“There are some hospitals that still have stock on their shelves,” Spendler said, “and since they have not had surgeries, they have not experienced the crisis to the level most have.”

A variety of factors seems to somewhat offset the shortage in Orange County, including relatively light surgery schedules, adequate inventories at some hospitals and blood donations by hospital staffs, such as at UCI Medical Center.

“We have plenty of blood,” said Dr. John Fales, director of Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian’s blood bank. “We have no blood shortage today. We were suffering from a mild shortage (on Wednesday), but not acute.

Surgery Schedule Unaffected “No elective surgery has been cut back,” Fales said. “The surgery schedule is completely normal. We have an adequate supply for the next few days.”

Other Orange County hospitals reported that they had been able to meet their demand all week, but Spendler said blood banks at many of those hospitals have been juggling inventories to do so.

“We haven’t had any major problem,” said Dr. Michael Galligan, blood bank director at Western Medical Center in Santa Ana. “We haven’t felt any crisis.”

But Bill Witter, senior blood bank technologist at Western Medical, said, “It looks like a high probability there will be some cancellations (today), but I can’t give you a number.”

More Needed for Emergencies Dr. James Thompson, director of the blood bank at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, said the shortage “hasn’t disrupted anything so far. We’re able to get the blood we need for the cases we have scheduled. But we don’t have a large additional supply for emergencies.”

St. Joseph and the adjacent Childrens Hospital of Orange County, which shares the hospital’s blood bank, “use more blood than any other single place in the county” and have experienced no crisis, Thompson said. “I wouldn’t want people to think there’s no problem, but we’re OK right now.”

Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, which still has only half a day’s supply of the critical blood types, has had to “juggle” several surgeries around, including delaying operations for some cancer, brain and heart patients, blood services director Dr. Carol Bell said.

“The shortage leaves everyone unprotected,” Bell said. “If a type O emergency case came in, we’d be too short to take it. We’re just fortunate that hasn’t happened.”

The shortage is partly due to bad weather conditions recently, which have forced cancellation of some blood drives, and because the Christmas and New Year’s Day holidays both fell on Tuesdays, usually one of the best collection days of the week, Red Cross officials said.

County-USC Medical Center has a one-day supply of type O blood, up from half a day’s stock on Wednesday, blood services director Dr. Ira Shulman said in Los Angeles.

“Ordinarily we have three to five days’ supply on hand. So if there is a big emergency, we have enough to cover it,” Shulman said. “But if the Red Cross couldn’t deliver 10 pints at the drop of a hat, if someone came in here losing a lot of blood, he could bleed to death.”

Shulman said that the hospital does draw blood from its employees and patients’ families and friends, but that the Red Cross supplies 75% of the hospital’s blood reserves.

“Even if we doubled our in-house donations, we’d still be way short,” he said.

The Red Cross, blood supplier for 200 hospitals in Los Angeles and Orange counties, said the situation is still critical, as the agency has received only enough donations to cover daily requests and is still more than 5,000 units short of replenishing stocks to a safe reserve level.

“We received 441 more units than we expected on Wednesday, but there’s no way we can replenish our supplies in a day,” Red Cross spokeswoman Gerry Sohle said. “We need people who have already made a commitment to give blood to do it, and we really need new donors.”

Mailers Sent Out The Red Cross sent out 200,000 mailers prior to the traditionally slow holidays, warning its regular donors of a potential blood shortage, she added. The organization now has all of its 22 mobile collecting units out and has been telephoning donors to alert them to the crisis and tell them where they can donate blood.

Although cities around the country are also experiencing shortages, Sohle said the situation is particularly bad in the Los Angeles area because there is such a great demand for type O blood.

“We have so many people who have type O blood--it is especially common among Hispanic peoples--yet we have so few donors,” she said.