Blood donation across the life course

Tjeerd Piersma won the Best Abstract award at the 2018 European Conference on Donor Health and Management (ECDHM). He studied the influence of life events such as childbirth, unemployment and the death of a family member on the likelihood that people stop donating blood.

By linking registry data from the Donor Database to survey data from Donor InSight he found that donors who recently got a child, started a job or lost their job were more likely to stop donating, while donors who experienced a blood transfusion for a family member or the death of a loved one were more likely to keep on donating in the years ahead. These findings might be important in designing personalized donor retention strategies.

His abstract can be found in the ECDHM 2018 abstract book. If you have any additional questions, you can e-mail Tjeerd at [email protected].