Donor notification and counseling: Experiences and challenges from a private multi-specialty hospital in South India

BACKGROUND: Donor notification and counseling plays a vital role in both blood safety and comprehensive donor care. This process informs donors about their status as to transfusion-transmitted infections (TTI), modes of transmission of such infections and helps prevent secondary transmission of these infections in the community. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: This study was initiated to see the response rate of notified reactive donors for counseling and to propose useful recommendations that could probably improve the response rate. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Total of 17025 donations was screened for TTIs, namely, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and syphilis, by serology. All TTI reactive donors were retested and notified of their status by telephone and called for repeat testing followed by face-to-face counseling and referral for treatment. RESULTS: We evaluated 183(1.07%) donors with reactive screening test results, i.e., 106(57.9%) HBV, 38(20.7%) HCV, 29(15.8%) HIV, and 11(0.6%) were syphilis reactive and all (100%) were from replacement blood donations. Only 58.4%(107) of donors could be personally communicated over telephone and only 49 (45.79%) of them returned for counseling. Three (6.1%) among the reactive donors knew their results earlier and 11(22.4%) donors had history of high-risk behavior. CONCLUSION: In spite of strict donor screening and self-exclusion option, donors conceal their high-risk behaviors or their reactive status and continue to donate blood. It reflects the need to implement thorough predonation counseling to extract the history of high-risk factors from the donors.