Boring blood drive: Blood Donation campaign As A Filler

I am in blood bank as a compulsory rotation as a pathology medical officer. One of my job is to go mobile. We call it mobile, most people knew it by the name 'Blood Donation Campaign'. Bloods are running low and we need to find blood in our stock or some patient will be in trouble.

What can I see through my experience in joining this mobile blood drive is there are not much people that are willing to donate blood. It is sad to get like 5-6 donors each time we went out for mobile. This team of mobile blood drive usually stay for hours from morning until afternoon waiting for donor. Most of the time they were just sitting around. 

Can't blame anyone as not many people are exposed to the reality of blood crisis. Not until their parent, child, or spouse need blood transfusion, then they will be all out to donate blood. For me, that was a little selfish. For example, once there were more than 20 people in our blood center, all willingly want to donate their blood. But then, the main reason for them to be there was their relative get admitted to the hospital and requiring blood for operation. What about those people who do not have relative around? Or Thalassemia patient who need blood every month? Their relative would not be able to donate that frequently. They were all dependant on blood donors. Those hidden heroes in our community. Not those heroes that want to save their grandma or theor child only. How many time you see superman or batman saving their relative or friend and just ignore the other person who are not related to them? Heroes don't do that. 

Another thing is, we usually become side show. Usually there will be organizer, NGO, government agency, association, that are willing to organize a blood drive for us. We only need to go to their designated place and collect some blood. Some of the organizer were good. I can only gave a few example among many good organiser, Astro, prudential, Tzu Chi, churches, blood donor association, to name a few. They usually organize this blood donation campaign as the main agenda of the event. Whilst, other organiser usually have their other agenda, leaving us as a side show or some of us called filler. Sometime a big event they held and we were sitting somewhere on the side waiting for donor who never comes. This kind of organiser should be told early that they need at least one of their own to donate blood and not just to put us as a filler for their agenda. There could be other places that we can go and get more donors yet we stuck in one event that seem do not realise we were there afterall. 

Today, as usual these two thing happen to me. I was so boring waiting for donors. We went back from our mobile blood drive with just a few collected blood but wasted hours of our time. We were paid to do this, but do you all want us to be paid just to sit around? 

TheN when  one of your closed one need blood transfusion and there are no blood around, dont blame us, blame yourselves for too late to be a hero..