Canadian Blood Services is making a plea ahead of the long weekend, asking Canadians to take some time out from their schedules to roll up their sleeves and donate.
Long weekends tend to be a time for increased car and other accidents. But summer is also a time when blood donations drop off, as people head out of town for vacations and regular donors cancel their usual appointments.
Angela Poon, a communications specialist with Canadian Blood Services in B.C. and Yukon region, says blood donations are down across the country.
"We've been struggling to collect blood all across the country for several weeks now -- I'd say even several months. Across the country we haven't been able to meet our targets," she told CTV British Columbia.
"This doesn't mean that anyone is going without blood. What it means is that we have a lower buffer than we'd like to have in our national inventory."
Blood is needed every minute of every day at hospitals across Canada. While elective surgeries tend to be scheduled less often during the summer, there are always emergency procedures: heart surgeries, transplant and cancer treatments.
Shaelyn Martin has been on the receiving end of blood donations many times. She's had more than 50 transfusions in her lifetime. And she's only three years old.
Shaelyn has been battling acute lymphoblastic leukemia almost since birth, having been diagnosed at just two months old.
"That night actually, the first treatment she had was both platelet and a blood transfusion," her mother Ginny Martin recently told CTV British Columbia.
That transfusion was the first of many for Shaelyn to help make her stable enough for chemotherapy treatments. These days, Shaelynn is cancer-free.
"This is the longest she's been in remission actually since she was born. She's never been cancer-free this long, so we're quite happy," says her mother.
Shaelyn's father, Sean, says he never realized the need for blood donations before illness hit his daughter.
"Until my daughter got sick I wasn't aware that blood is needed on such a constant basis for so many different things," he said.
"So just seeing the scope of the demand that's needed on a constant basis was quite awakening for us," he told CTV.
"That's why we'd really love to help out to try to help spread the word and encourage people who have maybe had (donating) on their to-do list for a long time to make the time to check it off. Because it's really, really important."
One unit of donated blood can be separated into several components: red blood cells, plasma, platelets and cryoprecipitate. While frozen plasma can be stored for one year, donated red blood cells can be stored for only about six weeks, while platelets have to be used within five days
The average blood transfusion requires three pints of blood or three donated units.
"Things like cancer treatment can use up to eight units a week," says Poon. "Car accident survivors can need up to 50 units in a day. Cardiac surgery can use up to a dozen units. A liver transplant -- something that you don't see every day but that could very well happen on a long weekend if the match comes in -- could use up to 100 units.
"So depending on the situation, our inventory could be depleted quite quickly, depending on what happens over the long weekend."
For more information on who can donate blood, visit . To book an appointment to donate, call 1 888 2 DONATE (1 866 236-6283).
Canadian Blood Services estimates a blood donation takes about an hour from the time you walk in, to the time you walk out. The process can be made more efficicient by calling ahead to book an appointment, but walk-ins are always welcome too.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Maria Weisgarber
