Gurugram: Plasma bank to be ready soon; finding donors remains a challenge

The district’s own dedicated plasma bank will become operational in the next three to four days, officials from the health department and district administration

The district’s own dedicated plasma bank will become operational in the next three to four days, officials from the health department and district administration said on Friday. They added that similar facilities are already operational at PGIMS Rohtak and ESI Hospital in Faridabad. The move, they said, would ease the challenge of finding donors — or patients who have recovered from Covid-19 — who are willing to provide plasma for the treatment of critical and moderately ill patients in Gurugram.

HT Image

Responding to a question at a press conference on Friday, Dr Virender Yadav, chief medical officer (CMO), Gurugram, said, “A website has been built to facilitate the functioning of the plasma bank. The district administration has also been working on finding donors. In the next three to four days, we are hoping to start the facility.” Amit Khatri, deputy commissioner, Gurugram, added, “We have prepared a database of recovered patients and are reaching out to them for plasma donation.”

Shubhi Kesarwani, officer-in-charge of the project, however, said that volunteers are seeing a poor ‘conversion rate’, despite reaching out to several hundreds of recovered patients, urging them to come forward and donate plasma. “We have prepared a data base of over 4,000 recovered patients, and Red Cross volunteers are busy calling them up, one by one. So far, we have seen a poor response. There is a lot of apprehension among recovered patients and most of them cleanly refuse to donate. So far, we only have around 50 consenting donors,” Kesarwani said.

While officials were reluctant to point to one singular reason as to why people are refusing to donate, they said that it is likely due to a fear of revisiting hospitals and medical centres, particularly after having endured the ordeal of recovery. They also said that stigma associated around the illness could very well be holding back the search for donors.

Once launched, Gurugram’s plasma bank will be the third such facility in Haryana, after Rohtak and Faridabad. Health minister Anil Vij, on Thursday, had inaugurated a plasma bank at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak, which has also been carrying out an independent clinical trial to assess the safety and efficacy of convalescent plasma therapy in treating moderately ill patients.

So far, as part of the trial, PGIMS Rohtak has administered plasma therapy to at least 10 patients, of whom three have been discharged, one patient has died, two are not responding well, and one more patient is responding relatively better. The status of the other three patients could not be verified.

A doctor at PGIMS, Rohtak, who was closely involved in the trial and requested anonymity, said, “We have administered plasma therapy to 10 patients, and the results are not very promising. But then, the sample size is also small. Plasma therapy as a useful modality still needs supporting evidence, but in the absence of other treatments, the ICMR and the Indian government are allowing it as compassionate or off-label use.”

The doctor was of the opinion that Gurugram, though well-equipped to administer plasma therapy, would continue to face challenges in finding consenting donors. “We have faced this same issue in Rohtak, and it is the same scenario across the country,” they said.