Bengaluru: When his sister-in-law was admitted to a hospital last week with a gynaecological problem, Chetan Jayatheertha volunteered to donate blood as she was badly in need of it. But what followed, shocked him as the hospital charged him Rs 11,000 for “processing single donor platelets."
“They charged me the Rs 11,000 despite the fact that I was voluntarily donating blood to my sister-in-law," recalls Chetan, who had no choice but to pay up.
Chetan's story is not unique. With the city being flooded with dengue cases, people are running to private blood banks for platelets and shelling out huge sums for them. Explaining the cost involved, Mr Alphonse Kurian of the Lions Blood Line, Bengaluru says, “Platelets for transfusion can be prepared either by separation of platelet concentrates from the blood or by apheresis from single donors. In the second case, platelets are separated, processed and collected from a single donor in a process known as apheresis and all other blood components are returned to him or her. The charges are for the processing involved as well as for the blood collected.”
Hospitals take into account the component preparation cost, preservation cost involving refrigerators, deep freezers, platelet incubators, and infrastructure costs like maintenance of equipment/ gadgets and other expenses, according to doctors.
While guidelines of the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), specify that single donor platelets (SDP) should cost a maximum of Rs 11,000 in private blood banks, random donor platelets (RDP), or platelets collected from multiple donors, cost a mere Rs 400 or less.
