Director of Medical Services Dr. Jackson Kioko at the Eldoret Regional Blood Transfusion Center on September 29, 2017 [Photo: Joe Khisa]
The Eldoret Regional Blood Transfusion Center has acquired state-of-the-art digital blood screening machines.
The machines were commissioned on Friday by the Director of Medical Services Dr Jackson Kioko who said they will go along way towards enhancing service delivery for the center and ensure blood being distributed to hospitals in the North Rift region is safe and of highest quality.
“Before this machines were acquired, it would take around three days to manually screen blood samples but with the modern facilities we will been able to drastically reduce that time to within hours,” noted Dr. Kioko.
“The quality of blood being distributed in our hospitals in these region will also be guaranteed as the machines are able to screen for syphilis, Hepatitis A&B and any other infections within the blood,” he added.
The Director of Medical Services further revealed that the government has set aside over sh200 million that will be used to equip all regional blood transfusion centers across the country as well as the satellite centers.
Currently there are six regional Blood Transfusion Centers located in Nakuru, Kisumu, Embu, Mombasa, Meru and Nairobi as well as 17 satellite centers spread across the country.
“Our plan is to have more satellite blood transfusion centers even in the remote areas and also having some Hospitals double as blood storage centers,” said Dr. Kioko who assured that the country has sufficient blood.
“Here in Eldoret we have 600 units of blood and we have send out a team which we expect to come back with at least 2,000 units which will be sufficient to be supplied to both public and private hospitals in the region,” he added.