Charley Guptill: Students ineligible to donate blood should be given alternate options
By Charley Guptill
March 3, 2014 12:06 a.m.
As a UCLA student, if you decide to take some time out of your day to save three lives, you’re rewarded with a movie ticket and a sippy juice box. Altogether, not a bad deal.
A single blood donation can help up to three patients, and at the UCLA Blood and Platelet Center, gratitude for a donation normally includes a movie ticket or some other souvenir.
Even more, students who hold jobs through the university can be indirectly compensated for blood donations. Those employees can bill four work hours for each time they give blood at the Blood and Platelet Center.
But not everyone has access to these benefits. As a gay man, I cannot give blood because men who have sex with men are at an increased risk for HIV and Hepatitis C, both of which can be transmitted through blood transfusions.
Those of us unable to donate blood are caught in a double bind. We are unable to help out the Blood and Platelet Center and also lose out on the chance to get compensated for that help.
Others who are ineligible to donate include people who weigh less than 110 pounds, have certain health issues, have a phobia of needles or have spent too long in a particular country. These restrictions are set nationally by the Food and Drug Administration and at the state level by the American Association of Blood Banks.
Students who would otherwise want to help patients in need are unable to because of these restrictions. These students should have the opportunity to contribute to the Blood and Platelet Center in some other capacity despite their ineligibility to give blood.
For example, the Blood and Platelet Center could offer ineligible students the chance to volunteer their time. Given that the current incentive policy is focused on increasing the blood supply, ineligible students could do tasks that encourage others to donate. Handing out fliers on Bruin Walk or making calls to students who haven’t donated in a while could lead to an increase in visits to the center.
Still, an effort to give ineligible students the opportunity to help must be paired with compensation equal to that received by students who donate blood.
Since a blood donation can take up to an hour, according to the Blood and Platelet Center’s website, the same time spent volunteering with the center should allow those ineligible students to bill their work for four hours.
Students can donate blood every two months. Starting as a freshman, a student employee could donate regularly and bill more than 90 work hours over the course of four years.
I have an on-campus job and many of my coworkers make an additional $40 every couple of months.
The current incentive policy is effective in encouraging student employees to donate blood, but it creates an inequality of opportunity. Students ineligible to give blood do not have access to the same compensation, which is ethically questionable.
Moreover, because these benefits have to do with employment, a treacherous legal area, the issue is even more sensitive and deserving of UCLA’s attention.
UCLA should implement a policy that makes up for this discrepancy and offer another way for currently ineligible communities to be involved in the process of blood donation and bill work hours for that involvement.
While the incentive system is ultimately necessary to ensure an adequate blood supply, its implementation is exclusionary. A special accommodation for ineligible students is necessary so that those who can’t donate blood can still benefit from the compensation available to others and help bolster the blood supply.
Email Guptill @[email protected] or tweet him @CharlesGuptill. Send general comments to [email protected] or tweet us @DBOpinion.
