National Blood Transfusion Center : Professor Dora Mbanya for Regular and Voluntary Blood Donation

The Director-General of the National Blood Transfusion Center (NBTC) once again invited the population to this noble cause on March 12, 2024, during the opening of the first conference of the central and decentralized services of the center for the current year.

The National Blood Transfusion Center (NBTC) is holding the first edition of its conference for central and decentralized services from March 12 to 15, 2024, in Yaoundé. The theme is “accelerating the deployment of the NBTC in the regions to intensify the mobilization for ethical blood donation.” The three-day event is chaired by Professor Dora Mbanya, the Director-General of the NBTC. The objective of the meeting is to assess the activities of 2023 and plan those for the year 2024. Speaking of the assessment, there is still a glaring deficit in blood bags in hospitals. “Cameroon needs approximately 400,000 blood bags per year, and at the moment, we are barely at 35% of collections. This means that the needs are still enormous,” emphasized Professor Dora Mbanya. To bridge the gap, she specified that it is necessary to “encourage the population to donate blood regularly without waiting for remuneration and not only when a relative or friend is sick and needs a blood donation.”

To make the work of the NBTC more effective in the field, the objectives of this Yaoundé meeting are specific: to strengthen the capacities of the staff on ethical, deontological, and administrative practices, as well as on the strategic plan for the deployment of the NBTC; to assess the level of deployment of the NBTC at the regional level, as well as the related challenges and opportunities; to identify appropriate actions and measures to consolidate and accelerate the deployment of the NBTC in the field and to set specific guidelines to govern the action of the NBTC in 2024 based on a thorough analysis of the context of accelerating its deployment at the decentralized level.

Saving Lives

As a reminder, according to Article 4 of Decree No. 2019/067 of February 12, 2019, on the organization and functioning of the National Blood Transfusion Center, the Center’s mission is to ensure the availability and accessibility of quality blood products throughout the national territory. It is therefore hoped that the conference of the central and decentralized services of the NBTC, which is taking place on March 15, 2024, will lead to concrete solutions to accelerate the pace of blood bag collections in Cameroon to save lives.

Rostand TCHAMI