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The recent winter storm and extreme cold have worsened an already severe shortage of donated blood, according to the American Red Cross’s Northern New England Region.
On Monday, following a winter storm that dumped up to 20 inches of snow across Vermont, the Red Cross canceled its blood drives in the state, forgoing the collection of 47 units of blood, according to Jennifer Costa, the New England region’s communications director for the organization.
“The need for blood does not stop for Mother Nature, but if it is unsafe for staff or donors to get there, we will cancel a drive,” Costa said.
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That cancellation compounded an existing national shortage. On Jan. 20, the organization reported a 35% drop in its blood supply throughout January, compared to a month earlier.
Some Vermont hospitals are beginning to see the downstream effects of this reduction. Saisha Branchaud, who directs Rutland Regional Medical Center’s pharmacy operations, said the hospital started to experience the shortage Wednesday, when a shipment of platelets the hospital had been expecting did not arrive.
When that happens, the medical center must find other ways to manage patients in need of platelet transfusion, which often includes transferring them to other hospitals. Platelets, which are a part of the blood, are essential to stop bleeding and are often given to patients who have autoimmune issues, cancers or other factors that prevent them from clotting.
If all hospitals in a region experience the same blood shortages, “a decision would need to be made about who we need to save these platelets for,” Branchaud said.
Hospitals in the UVM Health network, which includes the flagship medical center in Burlington, Porter Hospital in Middlebury and Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, have not yet seen impacts of the shortage, according to network spokesperson Phillip Rau. However, the hospitals “are aware of and monitoring the situation,” he wrote in an email.
Rau added that a broader decline of blood donors has meant the “hospitals and health systems have become very adept at managing blood supplies and ensuring patients don’t see negative impacts, like changes in scheduled procedures, treatments or care.”
Nearly all of Vermont’s hospitals are reliant on the Red Cross for blood, since none have the on-sight facilities needed to process donated blood. Dartmouth Health, across the border in Lebanon, New Hampshire, does have these capabilities, and its Vermont partner hospitals receive blood through Dartmouth.
Some winter dips in blood supply are typical, as the holiday season curbs some donations, but this year’s particularly virulent flu season and winter storms have led to a more drastic dip in the number of donors, Branchaud and Costa explained.
With a shelf life of 42 days, blood is fairly easy to move around regions based on need. Usually, Vermonters’ relative resilience to winter weather allows the state to emerge as a source of donated blood for other regions when they are slammed by storms, Costa said. However, this most recent storm affected such a vast stretch of the country that the shortage spans nationally. Nationwide, the Red Cross needed to cancel nearly 500 blood drives, according to a release.
Though this year’s shortage is more pronounced, it fits into a larger pattern of declining donations, attributed to both climatic emergencies and a changing culture. Costa said the number of people giving blood to the Red Cross nationally has dropped by 300,000 since 2019, which she attributed to a shift toward remote work and away from communal congregating. The number of Red Cross blood donors has dropped from 3.7 million in 2003 to 2.1 million in 2022, Costa added.
In both January 2024 and 2022, the Red Cross experienced critically low blood donation levels, she said. In January 2024, Vermont had to forgo 28 units of blood — this January’s shortage is nearly double that.
The Red Cross’s Northern New England branch is now urging Vermonters to help the deficit in supply.
“There are very real world consequences to a shortage, and without blood, hospitals are going to have to make very difficult decisions that nobody wants to make,” Costa said.
