Saving lives can be quick, easy and very gratifying

I have a bit of a con­fes­sion to make. Don’t worry, it’s noth­ing gross or em­bar­rass­ing. It is as sim­ple as this: I have to admit that I have never given blood in this coun­try. Giv­ing blood was some­thing I used to do reg­u­larly when I still lived in the UK, but since com­ing to live here I have never got round to it. What makes it all the worse is that it’s not be­cause of a med­ical prob­lem or any­thing, it is sim­ply be­cause I have been too lazy and in­ef­fi­cient to sort it out. And giv­ing blood is easy, so there’s ab­solutely no ex­cuse.

How easy it is to do you can find out on pages 24-27, where we have a fea­ture on Cat­alo­nia’s Blood and Tis­sue Bank, as well as an in­ter­view with one of the blood bank’s di­rec­tors. We all know how im­por­tant it is for hos­pi­tals to al­ways have blood avail­able, and in Cat­alo­nia the sys­tem is very well run. Yet, what read­ing the fea­ture brought home to me, even though in the­ory I al­ready knew it, was that blood ex­pires. Nat­u­rally, that means it is very im­por­tant to not only give blood, but to keep giv­ing blood, as there is a con­stant need. An­other thing the ar­ti­cle made me re­alise is that blood is needed, not just for ac­ci­dents and emer­gen­cies, but daily, for thou­sands of pa­tients suf­fer­ing a va­ri­ety of ill­nesses.

As the blood bank di­rec­tor Enric Con­tr­eras says in an in­ter­view on page 26, giv­ing blood should re­ally be con­sid­ered a civic duty. In our 21st cen­tury world of in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic con­sumerism and in­stant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, we often seem happy to hand off our so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to the au­thor­i­ties, com­pa­nies and, these days, even ma­chines and de­vices. A ges­ture as sim­ple as giv­ing blood is a way of mak­ing a gen­er­ous con­tri­bu­tion to our fel­low hu­mans and our com­mu­nity. Blood is given freely and such gen­uinely al­tru­is­tic ges­tures seem to be few and far be­tween these days. The only profit mo­tive in­volved in any way is the ben­e­fit you get from how good it makes you feel to know you have dis­in­ter­est­edly helped some­one in need.

What’s more giv­ing blood hardly takes any time, and so we can­not even re­sort to the oft-heard ex­cuse that we are sim­ply too busy, which is some­thing I am guilty of. If you don’t give blood, I urge you to look into doing so, I for one will cer­tainly be sign­ing up and fi­nally doing my duty.