The second symposium from hamro lifebank was successfully held on June 14, 2021 on the occasion of World Blood Donors Day. The symposium was entitled “Blood Donation in the Digital Age”. The main objective of this symposium was to highlight the digital technological intervention for improving donor care and experience in Nepal. The panelists for our symposium were Mr. Dibya Raj Poudel, Ms. Dipika Hada, Mr. Sanu Babu Prajapati and Mr. Saurav Thapa Shrestha.We started our symposium with a thematic presentation from Mr. Dibya Raj Poudel, Director of Nepal RedCross Society, Central Blood Transfusion Service (NRCS CBTS), where he shared his experience and overview of how technology can help to increase the donor pool and retain existing ones. He shared the importance of blood donation and motivation to onboard youth to donate blood once they are eligible to do so. He talked about how we can increase the donor pool by using technology. And also, shared how NRCS is working using digital technology and shared its future plans to use technology to its extent for donor motivation.Our panelist shared their knowledge, experiences and learnings on utilizing digital technologies for donor motivation and how it can also be used during pandemic situations like now. Ms. Dipika shared her experience of her first donation and how simple use cases of digital technology like frequent and timely email alerts and sms motivates her to continue donating blood. She focused majorly on donor engagement and suggested blood banks and blood volunteer groups to have them in their priority to onboard more donors like herself to donate blood. Mr. Saruva shared his experience in working to find plasma for covid patients, how proper data keeping helped plasma connect be efficient enough to help more people in need of plasma. Mr Prajapati explained the need and benefits of collaborative efforts to achieve this common goal of eliminating blood scarcity in Nepal and how technology can be used by blood volunteer groups like BLODAN to bring more individuals to donate blood regularly.The symposium was moderated by Ms. Shristi Piya, Head of Operations of Hamro LifeBank. Symposium and was supported by NRCS CBTS. The symposium was hosted in the virtual platform Zoom and was streamed live via hamro lifebank Facebook page. There were 60+ participants in the event.The symposium was followed by answering the questions from participants by the respective panelists. The entire session was one and half hours long and was attended by various blood donor clubs, blood volunteer organizations, blood banks and blood donors. You can watch the full session recording of blood donation in the digital age here.
