NHS Blood and Transplant has announced it may stop its blood donor sessions at Okehampton’s Charter Hall as it conducts a review on the donation service across Devon and Cornwall.

A review is underway assessing the current number of blood donation sessions in the two counties. The review will look at potentially revising donation sessions so that the NHS can collect more blood at its larger venues.

The local donation team run sessions in venues such as church halls, community centres and village halls across the area — including venues like Tavistock Methodist Church, Okehampton’s Charter Hall, Callington Town Hall and Chagford’s Jubilee Hall.

An NHS spokesperson said that many of these venues can only accommodate a smaller six-chair session and in an effort to collect blood as efficiently as possible, the NHS is considering focusing on larger nine-chair sessions where more donors can be accommodated in one go.

Mike Stredder, director of blood donation at NHS Blood and Transplant said: ‘We are very grateful to all those who give up their time to donate blood. Their generosity helps save and improve the lives of patients across the country.

‘Hospital blood use is declining by 3-4% a year and this means that sometimes we need to consider reducing the amount of blood donation sessions that we hold. It’s important that we do not waste precious donations by collecting too much blood.

‘While hospitals are using less blood than in previous years, we still need to collect 1.5-million units of blood a year. We look forward to seeing our loyal donors at their next donation.’

Blood is collected and distributed on a regional and a national basis and the NHS plans its sessions carefully to collect the right amount of blood that hospital patients need.

An NHS spokesperson said: ‘When we make changes, we will continue to run our awareness campaigns because we must attract new donors to secure the donor base of the future and to ensure we have the right mix of blood groups.

‘Every year thousands of donors can no longer continue to donate for reasons such as illness, pregnancy, and foreign travel. We need 200,000 new blood donors each year to replace those donors no longer able to donate.

‘We have a particular need to recruit certain types of blood donors and blood types to ensure we have the right mix of blood, to meet the needs of all patients.’

Any changes following the review will not affect the NHS’s ability to supply blood to local hospitals, so patients will still receive the blood they need. The NHS says it means it can be more targeted in what blood types and volumes it collects based on patient need.

Every blood donation can save or improve up to three lives and each day NHS Blood and Transplant needs around 6,000 donors to give blood at sessions across England to meet patient need. 

While donors from all blood groups are important, the NHS particularly needs donors from O negative (the universal blood group), A negative and B negative to donate regularly as our stocks of these blood groups are more vulnerable to shortfalls.

The NHS needs more black and south Asian people to become blood donors to reflect the ethnic diversity of patients.

To find out more about blood donation, visit www.blood.co.uk