Service Learning: Bloodworks Northwest Center

Outside of the school, I volunteer at the Bloodworks northwest center as a donor monitor. It’s not a onetime service learning event; I went help twice every month for 4 hours each. My job is to keep an eye on donors who just finishing giving blood and make sure they don't have any side reactions. I help provide food, drinks and provide, friendly, hospitality and professional service. I can’t take photo in the center so I found this picture on their website.

Figure 1: Picture of a Donor Monitor Volunteer 

The event organizer’s name is: Jeremy Vollman, LSSGB, and his email address is: JeremyV@BloodWorksNW.org

The goal for this volunteer is to monitor the blood donor’s safety after their made their blood donation. Because the donors are selflessly giving their blood, the organizer wants them to feel welcome and thankful, and also, the organizer wants to provide the donors a positive, friendly environment when the donors are relaxing after their donation.

I have learned a lot while doing volunteer service there in the center. There are four ways that donors can make a blood donation, they can donate double red cell, platelets, plasma and whole blood. Most of the people were there doing whole blood donation, and they can donate again every 56 days after their donation. I have also learned a lot of new information about what specific area can these different types of blood donations be used at, such as for platelets donations, it can be only stored for 5 days, but it can be helped with heart surgery, burn, organ transplant and bone marrow transplant patients. There are many medical treatments require platelet transfusions, and platelet transfusion is needed every day. For plasma donations, it can be used for trauma, burn patients and other serious injury.

I was really surprised that there were so many people went to the center every day and donate blood. It makes me so grateful that I want to do something to give back to our community. I've been doing this volunteer work for more than half a year and I think I will keep volunteering until I transfer.

Because I volunteer at a blood center so I was mostly learning stuffs about blood. For this quarter, our course title name is major animal and even though we didn’t really cover information about blood this quarter, blood plays an important part in animals’ body. It flows all the times inside of the vessel; help transport nutrients and oxygen to different parts of body and cells.

    

    1. What makes the donors start to donate blood?

    2. How do they store the blood?

    3. How many blood donation are required per day?

    4. Sometimes I see donors got reject when they come to make a donation, why?