blood-300x135If you happened to have donated blood during National Blood Donor Week, you can rest assured that your blood is being used more efficiently and going further than ever before.

The demand for blood has gone down almost 7% since 2008, and Canadian blood services director of utilization Dr. Kathryn Webert says a big part of that is improvements in surgical techniques.

“Surgeries can be not as invasive as they were in the past. They’re able to do things laparoscopically so with cameras, so that the patients don’t seem to bleed as much. There’s also medications that they can use to prevent bleeding during the surgery.”

Webert says there are a lot of other factors, from cancer drugs that don’t do as much damage the bone marrow that makes red blood cell, to better pre-patient screening to make sure people aren’t anemic.

She says there is still always a great need for donors and says because of the number of current donors who are no longer able to give for one reason or another they will need about 140,000 new donors.