WITH negative blood types being the rarest among Jamaicans, the National Blood Transfusion Service Director Dr Kamille West-Mitchell is urging citizens, particularly those with O-negative blood, to donate and boost the country’s blood supply, which has long faced shortages.

She noted that Jamaica collects approximately 30,000 units of blood each year, only half of the estimated 60,000 units to meet the nation’s needs. With just one to three per cent of Jamaicans possessing negative blood types — A-negative, B-negative, AB-negative, and O-negative — Dr West-Mitchell said the donor pool is relatively small. She said this is especially concerning for O-negative patients, who can only receive blood from O-negative donors but whose blood is frequently used in emergency situations because it can be safely transfused to patients of any blood type.

“If we don’t know your blood type — let’s say you’ve had a car accident or surgery or something and you didn’t know your blood type before — to minimise your risk, O-negative is a universal donor that can go to anybody, so there’s a lot of demand for O-neg. We have accidents, we have crashes, we have violence, we have all kinds of things where people are bleeding and we don’t know their blood type so we need more O-negative than we have, for sure,” she told the Jamaica Observer.