On 14 June 2023, World Blood Donor Day will again be celebrated throughout the world.

Officially designated as an annual event by the World Health Assembly in 2005, the Day provides a special opportunity to celebrate and thank voluntary blood donors around the world for their gift of blood, and has become a major focus for action towards achieving universal access to safe blood transfusion.

Every single donation is a precious lifesaving gift and repeat donation is the key to building a safe and sustainable blood supply. 

In many countries, blood services face the challenge of making sufficient blood available, while also ensuring its quality and safety. Lack of access to safe blood and blood products—especially in low-and middle-income countries, impacts all patients including those requiring regular transfusion.

One of WHO strategies is to assist low-and middle-income countries in improving the availability and quality of human plasma, including optimising the utilisation of the plasma recovered from whole blood donations, and increasing patients’ access to the life-saving plasma protein therapies.

Focus of this year’s campaign

The slogan for 2023 World Blood Donor Day campaign is “Give blood, give plasma, share life, share often.”  It focuses on patients requiring life-long transfusion support and underlines the role every single person can play, by giving the valuable gift of blood or plasma. It also highlights the importance of giving blood or plasma regularly to create a safe and sustainable supply of blood and blood products that can be always available, all over the world, so that all patients in need can receive timely treatment. 

The objectives are to:

????celebrate and thank individuals who donate blood and encourage more people to become new donors;

????encourage people in good health to donate blood regularly, as often as is safe and possible, to transform the quality of life for transfusion dependent patients and help to build a secure blood supply in all countries in the world;  

????highlight the critical roles of voluntary non-remunerated regular blood and plasma donations in achieving universal access to safe blood products for all populations; and 

????mobilize support at national, regional and global levels among governments and development partners to invest in, strengthen and sustain national blood programmes.

Activities that would help promote the slogan of this year’s World Blood Donor Day may include donor appreciation ceremonies, social networking campaigns, special media broadcasts, social media posts featuring individual blood donors with the slogan, meetings and workshops, musical and artistic events to thank blood donors, and coloring the iconic monuments red or yellow.

Countries are encouraged to disseminate to various media outlets stories of people, in particular transfusion-dependent patients, whose lives have been saved through blood or plasma donation as a way of motivating blood and plasma donation.

Republished with permission. See here for original article.

World Blood Donor Day 2023: Give blood, give plasma, share life, share often. https://www.who.int/news-room/events/detail/2023/06/14/default-calendar/world-blood-donor-day-2023: World Health Organization; 2023. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.