Life events and donor lapse among blood donors in Denmark

Abstract

Background and objectives The likelihood of donating blood changes over the life course, with life events shown to influence entry to and exit from the donor population. While these previous findings provide valuable insights for donor management, blood collection agencies need to be cautious about generalizing findings to other countries as blood donor behaviour is context-specific. To examine cross-country variations in donor behaviour, the repeatability of a previous Dutch study on life events and blood donor lapse is examined by using a sample of Danish donors.Materials and methods Register data from Statistics Denmark was linked to the Scandinavian Donations and Transfusions database (n = 152 887). Logistic regressions were conducted to examine the association between life events in 2009-2012 and blood donor lapse in 2013-2014. ResultsOf the total sample, 69 079 (45Á2%) donors lapsed. Childbirth and losing a job increased the lapsing risk by 11% and 16%, respectively, while health-related events in the family (i.e. blood transfusion, disease and death) decreased the lapsing risk by 5%, 7% and 9%, respectively.Conclusion Life events are associated with donor lapse of Danish donors. These results are comparable to previous findings from the Netherlands (i.e. childbirth and labour market transitions increased lapsing risk; health-related events decreased lapsing risk), with two thirds of the associations being in the same direction. Differences between study results were mainly related to effect sizes and demographic compositions of the donor pools. We argue contextual factors to be of importance in blood donor studies.

Gone, but haven't forgotten: insights on plasmapheresis donation from lapsed donors

“…This finding also suggests that lengthy donation breaks may not always be related to changes in motivation. Rather, and consistent with previous research [5,7–8], as donors transition through different life stages, particularly moving house, changing jobs or having children, routines may be disrupted and donating plasma may become inconvenient and difficult to prioritise. Perceived (in)convenience is a recognised barrier to retention [6], and these data suggest that this can also impact the decision of which product to donate, particularly given the additional time requirements of plasmapheresis.…”

“…The conceptual framework for the interviews and coding was derived from known reasons for lapsing from the whole blood and plasma literature, as well as insights into the influence of life‐course factors on reasons for lapsing from donation [3,7,8]. A critical realist, interpretive approach was used, combined with deductive and inductive coding [11].…”

“…Increasingly, research findings suggest that deterrents to donation, and reasons for lapsing from whole‐blood donation, differ by gender, life‐stage and country of donation [6–7]. Piersma and colleagues (2019) investigated the relationship between key life course‐related events and donor lapse among whole‐blood donors in the Netherlands and Denmark [7–8]. They reported that, among Danish donors, having a child and losing a job were associated with a greater risk of lapse, while in the Netherlands, starting a new job was associated with lapse.…”

Understanding donation frequency: insights from current plasma donors

“…In order to obtain the perspectives of diverse donors, we included participants with a range of donation experience averaged out over the previous two years (2015–2017), varying lengths of donation careers and ages. Recruiting participants with a range of ages was considered important, as the daily activities that may compete with donating plasma are likely to change over the life span . For donors with less than two years of donation experience we considered their frequency over 2016–2017 only.…”

Improving Blood Donor Retention and Donor Relationships with Past Donation Use Appeals

“…This finding is in line with research showing that relationship quality is less important in the initial life-cycle stages (Cambra-Fierro et al 2018b). However, the results in Table 3 show that past donation use appeals are still effective for novice donors, even after their first donation, which is important because these donors tend to have higher lapse rates (Leipnitz et al 2018; Van Dongen 2015) and thus are typically more challenging to retain (Piersma et al 2019). Overall, we conclude that past donation use appeals are an effective strategy to improve donor retention, even in the early stages of the donor life cycle, though this effect is strengthened as donor experience increases.…”