Chairperson and committee
Chairperson: Rachel Thorpe (Australia)
Secretary: Jennie Haw (Canada)
Education Officer: Noriko Namba (Japan)
Membership
The Working Party currently has 49 members, representing 30 different countries around the globe.
Meetings and Teleconferences
Since the new leadership team took over in July 2024 we have held one online meeting in February 2025. Dr Surendra Karki from Australian Red Cross Lifeblood presented his work on ‘Long-term health impacts of blood donation: Experience from a cohort study in Australia’, the sub-groups presented updates and discussed planning for the meeting in Milan.
The leadership team has met at least monthly to discuss plans for the coming year and to plan our meeting in Milan
Activities during the period
- The leadership team has updated the terms of reference for the WP and these have been approved by the ISBT Board
- The chair emailed all WP members to ask if they still wish to be members
- Following discussion of priority areas for the members at the face to face meeting in Barcelona, all active members were surveyed, asking them to nominate the priority areas for themselves and their organisation. Based on responses, we have set up four sub-groups: Recruitment and retention, Iron management, Public Health Partnerships and Returning abnormal results to donors
- The sub-groups have all met for the first time in February/March 2025 and are planning work for the next year.
- The abnormal results sub-group is planning to conduct a Vox Sanguinis International Forum.
- The Public health group is planning to undertake some desk research to understand a bit more about what kinds of formal and informal public health partnerships blood operators mention on their websites and then based on that may survey blood operators to explore more about how they position themselves in relation to public health/health care.
- The other two subgroups are still planning their work for the coming year.
