Just as the federation of blood donors has warned, a lack of blood donations is leading to delays in programmed surgeries. The president of the Santa Maria Local Health Unit (ULS) said that four surgeries were postponed last week (all on the same day) due to a shortage of group A and 0 blood, admitting that there are “measures underway” to increase collections (but for these to be successful, people do need to volunteer as donors). “We had one day with four surgeries postponed, but we mustn’t forget that blood isn’t the same, that is, each patient needs a certain unit of blood, so we had the misfortune that on that day four patients needed certain specific units of blood and we didn’t have them,” Carlos Martins told Lusa.
More surgeries delayed due to lack of “specific blood units”
