|
The National Blood Transfusion Council (NBTC) plans to upgrade the capacities of metro blood banks from one lakh units annually to one million units annually following the signing of MoUs with the governments of Delhi and Tamil Nadu for setting up metro blood banks in New Delhi and Chennai.
Metro blood bank project is a central sector scheme of the Union health ministry to set up state-of-the-art centres of excellence in transfusion medicine in the four metro cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.
These centres are high volume blood collection centres equipped with state of the art technology in transfusion medicine for component separation, processing of blood and quality systems.
Facilities for screening of collected blood by Nucleic Acid Amplification Test (NAT) would be made available at these centres and also extended to the other blood banks of the states.
MoUs signed between between J Radhakrishnan, health secretary, government of Tamil Nadu and Dr C V Dharma Rao, joint secretary, NACO, ministry of health and family welfare in the presence of secretary, Union ministry of health and family welfare, B P Sharma, N S Kang, additional secretary and director general (DG) NACO and Dr R S Gupta, director NBTC formalizes central government support to set up and run these centres in the state of Tamil Nadu, for which land has been provided free of cost by the state. Central government has also approved an outlay of approximately Rs.200 crore per centre for this important initiative.
Approval of Union health minister has been accorded for the first phase, wherein these facilities will come up in Chennai and Delhi. NBTC under National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) will be the implementing division of the ministry for this project.
There are plans to set up a metro blood bank in Mumbai also for which resources have to be identified, according to a health ministry source.
Access to safe blood to all the needy is the primary responsibility of NACO. Currently, it is supported by a network of 1103 blood banks including 132 Blood Component Separation Units (BCSUs) and 10 Model Blood Banks.
In addition to constantly enhancing awareness about the need to access safe blood and blood products, NACO has supported the procurement of equipments, test kits and reagents as well as the recurring expenditure of government blood banks and those run by voluntary/charitable organisations that were modernised.
National AIDS Control Programme (NACP) is implementing a scheme for modernisation of blood banks by providing one time equipments for testing and storage as well as annual recurrent grant for support of manpower, kits and consumables.
During NACP I and II, blood banks in all districts of the country were taken up under the scheme for modernisation of blood banks, except for the newly created districts.
|