31 July 2008
New Delhi, India
The government will set up blood banks in the four metros as Centres of Excellence in Transfusion Medicine at a cost of INR 468 crore
India will set up four state–of–the–art blood banks and transfusion medicine Centres of Excellence (CoE) in its four metropolitan cities–New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai.
The INR 468 crore CoEs will ensure 24 hour availability of blood and will be designed to meet the highest standards of safety, reports IANS, quoting the country’s Finance Minister P. Chidambaram.
Chidambaram was speaking after a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) presided over by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, on Thursday.
Each centre will collect more than 100,000 units of blood annually. These will be processed into three blood components, resulting in the generation of more than 300,000 units, Chidambaram said.
The centres will handle any type of natural or manmade disaster or outbreaks like dengue, which often require large volumes of blood transfusions at short notice, he added.
“Blood will only be collected from voluntary donors through state of art blood mobiles, qualitatively improving the system of collection”, the minister said.
He further said that these centres would benefit in strengthening blood transfusion services in the country for access to safe and quality blood and blood products in metro cities and would be comparable to international standards.
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