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blood supply
16
SEPT / OCT 2015
I
Healthcare Journal of baton rouge
encourage donors to come in a few times a
year tomaintain a healthy blood supply for
the Baton Rouge community.
“A lot of times people don’t think it’s
important to donate blood until you know
someone that needs blood or you need blood
yourself, and then you realize the urgency
to do it,” said Tommie Langlois, donor
resources coordinator for LifeShare Baton
Rouge. “But the bottom line is, if someone
doesn’t make the time, it won’t be there for
any of us. You have to make the time.”
How Standalone and Hospital-based
Blood Donor Centers Differ
Blood donors have the option of donat-
ing at hospital-based centers, such as Our
Lady of the Lake’s Blood Donor Center, or
blood goes only to patients at that hospital.
While that is often true, it is not always the
case, as the Blood Donor Center at Our Lady
of the Lake provides blood for many facil-
ities throughout the region outside of the
hospital itself. Still, standalone blood cen-
ters tend to be immediately recognized as
the “community’s blood centers,”whichmay
be more attractive to some donors.
A lot of times people don’t think it’s
important to donate blood until you
know someone that needs blood or you
need blood yourself, and then
you realize the urgency to do it.”
standalone blood centers, such as LifeShare
or United Blood Services. While the donat-
ing procedures are generally the same, the
two types of centers do differ in other ways.
Hospital-based blood centers workmore
directly with hospitals and their patients, so
these centers may have a better chance of
their blood being used. Blood centers in
hospitals also have a better opportunity to
encourage family and friends of patients
who have recently needed blood to donate
blood to replace the blood used by their
loved one. It can also be more financially
viable for a hospital to have its own blood
center than to have to buy those products
from a third party.
Adrawback for hospital-based blood cen-
ters, however, is that donors may assume the
Mitzi Breaux
Tommie Langlois
1902
1903
1917
Hay
Thankfully the Hay Diet does not involve
eating hay, but rather is named for William
Hay who introduces the notion of avoiding
“foods that fight”—combinations that cause
imbalance in our bodies.
Masticate
On the advice of British PM William
Gladstone, Horace Fletcher suggests that
chewing each bite of food a minimum of 32 times
can aid digestion and weight loss, especially if
you spit the food out before swallowing.
Every Bit Counts
Perhaps the first
to suggest counting calories, Los Angeles
physician Lulu Hunt Peters also holds
“Watch Your Weight Anti-Kaiser” classes
for wartime food conservation.
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