Blood donor safety and deferral
Professor Emanuele Di Angelantonio, Professor Michel Clement & Associate Professor Edlira Shehu
Safety and efficiency of blood donation – experience from the UK blood donor population studies
Professor Emanuele Di Angelantonio
Emanuele Di Angelantonio is a Professor, and Programme Leader and Director of the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Blood and Transplant Research Unit in Donor Health and Genomics in Cambridge. Emanuele’s research interests to date have focused on three broad topics: (1) cardiovascular disease screening and risk prediction, (2) global vascular health, and (3) blood donor health.
In his recent DoRN Week of Talks presentation, Emanuele discusses three large-scale studies conducted as part of a collaboration with the NHS Blood and Transplant service. These studies include: INTERVAL (50,000-person randomised trial), COMPARE (30,000-person observational study) and STRIDES (1.3M-person cluster randomised trial).
To access Emanuele’s free talk, please click on the link below:
In his recent DoRN Week of Talks presentation, Emanuele discusses three large-scale studies conducted as part of a collaboration with the NHS Blood and Transplant service. These studies include: INTERVAL (50,000-person randomised trial), COMPARE (30,000-person observational study) and STRIDES (1.3M-person cluster randomised trial).
To access Emanuele’s free talk, please click on the link below:
Deferral management across blood donors’ life cycle
Professor Michel Clement & Associate Professor Edlira Shehu
Michel Clement is a Professor for Marketing and Media at the Institute for Marketing, Hamburg Business School, University of Hamburg, Germany. His research focus is on media management, new technologies, customer relationship management, and blood donation management. Edlira Shehu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing at Copenhagen Business School. Edlira’s research focuses on topics of marketing analytics, digital marketing and non-profit marketing.
In their recent DoRN Week of Talks presentation, Michel and Edlira discuss their recent paper which looks at the impact of temporary deferrals on future blood donation behaviour across the donor life cycle. This research was conducted with the aim of better understanding how specific donor experience and also the number of previous deferrals have an impact on the overall negative effect of a deferral.
To access Michel and Edlira’s free talk, please click on the link below.
In their recent DoRN Week of Talks presentation, Michel and Edlira discuss their recent paper which looks at the impact of temporary deferrals on future blood donation behaviour across the donor life cycle. This research was conducted with the aim of better understanding how specific donor experience and also the number of previous deferrals have an impact on the overall negative effect of a deferral.
To access Michel and Edlira’s free talk, please click on the link below.
Q & As
The DoRN Week of Talks provided a unique opportunity to engage in an easy and convenient Q & A with presenters. Below we have listed the questions that we received for Professor Emanuele Di Angelantonio, Professor Michel Clement & Associate Professor Edlira Shehu, along with their answers.
Q&A- Professor Emanuele Di Angelantonio
Why do you think donors in the INTERVAL cohort had a longer donor career?
INTERVAL was a trail involving an “intense” donation regime. Hence mainly donors with a longer donation career were motivated in taking part of the trial. This provide some challenges in applying the overall results to new donors with a shorter history of donation.
Q&A- Professor Michel Clement & Associate Professor Edlira Shehu
What might deferral strategies which particularly target early career donors look like?
From a general sense, we argue that the treatments should be individually targeted towards the deferred donor. The best strategies may differ across the different life cycles. Tests by us in a working paper suggested that an alternative good deed might be helpful. Another good strategy is to provide a new date for the next attempt directly at the deferral.
You mentioned in the discussion that blood banks need to pay particular attention to deferrals amongst new donors and donors who have been deferred multiple times - this is also what we find in our studies, so I fully agree on that. I was wondering, do you have any suggestions on how blood banks would have to go about that?
We suggest defining a testing strategy across the donor population to test different approaches across different donation stages and deferral reasons. In our research, we could not distinguish between the reasons of deferral. We believe that this could be an interesting path, because deferrals due to tattoos may differ to deferrals due to health reasons. Referring to health reasons, we believe that offering a health check may be useful, as health checks have been shown to be a strong motivators for donors.
Literature: Leipnitz, Sigrun, Martha De Vries, Michel Clement, and Nina Mazar (2018): Providing health checks as incentives to retain blood donors – evidence from two field experiments, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 35, Issue 4, 628–640.