Canada's Blood Supply Needs to Match its Changing Ethnic Reality

As the existing population of Canadian donors ages and begins to drop off, CBS needs to replenish its donor base – and if it doesn’t have participation from these growing ethnic populations, which are increasingly making up the population of the country, there will be no way to keep up with the overall need for blood in Canada in the future.

CBS is a not-for-profit charitable organization that manages the national blood supply. Last spring, it began a campaign to specifically attract more donors from Canada’s Chinese, South Asian and Filipino communities. “These three are the largest and fastest-growing ethnic communities in Canada, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver,” says Wong. The campaign includes advertisements in Chinese, South Asian and Filipino newspapers and media. And with the help of ethnic community leaders (including church leaders), CBS has been organizing events to promote the idea of blood donations in cities and neighbourhoods that have a high prevalence of each of these groups.

As Wong explains, many of these ethnic communities simply don’t have a tradition of donating blood, whereas “there’s a cultural history within the Caucasian population.” Blood donating within a Caucasian-Canadian family may have begun during the war in the 1940s, she says, with family members passing down the blood-donating tradition to younger generations as the years went on.

Last summer, CBS also requested that its regulator, Health Canada, remove the requirement that all donors be fluent in either English or French. Health Canada approved that request, and now CBS is moving forward with a plan to have clinics in certain ethnic neighbourhoods hire an accredited interpreter to translate for donors who might not have the best English or French language skills. To start, there will soon be a Punjabi clinic in Brampton, Ont. (just outside of Toronto), and a Cantonese clinic in Vancouver.

Ethnicity issues aside, there are a number of other interesting demographic patterns that can be gleaned from statistics gathered by both Canadian Blood Services and Héma-Québec (which administers the blood donation program in Quebec), as illustrated by OpenFile’s interactive map on blood donations.

Interestingly, while there isn’t a huge variance in donation patterns among provinces, there is a noticeable difference between smaller towns and big cities: a greater percentage of the population will donate blood in a small town vs. a larger urban centre. Wong speculates this is partly because people in large cities tend to be less connected to their community, more anonymous. “In small towns, people tend to know each other more,” says Wong. “When their friend or neighbour is saying, ‘I just went to donate blood,’ it encourages someone to do the same. Also, in smaller communities where we have our mobile clinics, the blood donor clinic is almost an event; it’s like a gathering.”

Also, a great deal of blood tends to be exported from other areas of the country to Toronto, because Toronto has such a high concentration of trauma centres and specialty hospitals that are in constant need of blood supply. And since, as Wong mentioned, Toronto has a lower percentage of the overall population donating, the city tends to be supported heavily by donations from other parts of Ontario and Canada where there may be more people donating but less of a local need.

Across the country, young women (aged 17 to 29) are more likely to donate blood than young men, but that trend reverses in the older age groups, with men more likely to donate than women as they age. In Central Ontario (comprising the Greater Toronto Area, Peterborough and Barrie), the 17 to 29 age group saw 11,482 female donors in 2010 as compared to 9,940 males; but then in the 45 to 65 age group, it was 17,594 males vs. 15,138 females. This pattern was relatively consistent throughout Canada, with Héma-Québec’s stats showing the same thing: in Montreal, the 18 to 29 age group saw 5,447 females donating vs. 4,756 males, while the 40 to 49 age group had 3,075 male donors vs. 2,178 females. Throughout Canada, it appears the pattern of more men than women donating after the age of 30 continues into the 66-plus age group.

For the reversal among the older age groups, Wong guessed that this may have something to do with women in their child-rearing years (which stretch much later these days, with more women having babies into their early 40s) feeling there’s not enough time to donate blood as they juggle career, home and childcare demands.
The number of donors seems to peak in the 45 to 65 age group, likely because people have more time to spend donating blood by then, and also because the need starts to hit closer to home. When people begin to see their parents and even their peers getting ill and needing blood, donating seems more important.

Because Canadian Blood Services is a national organization, blood can be moved around the country from province to province depending on local need – and it frequently is. So no matter where you live or what your ethnic background, CBS wants to spread the word that all blood donations are vitally important and will be unquestionably put to good use. “We need more donors to get involved in the system,” says Wong. “The reality is, it takes a lot more blood to help someone than people realize.”