Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Senator for raising this important issue, which I am taking on behalf of the Minister, Deputy Carroll McNeill. I have taken all of her concerns on board and I will definitely come back at the end on what she has brought up.

The Irish Blood Transfusion Service is a non-commercial State agency responsible for collecting, processing, testing and distributing blood and blood products in Ireland. It relies completely on the generosity of voluntary non-remunerated donors to provide sufficient donations to ensure a consistent supply of blood. The IBTS is funded by charging hospitals for the products and testing services it provides to support patient care. The product pricing is informed by an activity-based cost recovery model. As part of the annual IBTS budget process, prices for blood and blood products are agreed and approved annually by the Minister for Health. The IBTS anticipates an income of approximately €86 million for 2025, with total projected costs for 2025 of €86 million, which results in a balanced budget. The IBTS is adequately funded and has not sought an increase in price since 2023. The current blood appeal is not related to funding.

The IBTS endeavours to maintain five to seven days' stock of each blood group. To ensure this, the IBTS remains in constant communication with hospitals in relation to blood stock levels. The IBTS has robust emergency blood management plans and business continuity plans to manage the national blood stocks in times of blood shortages. Since 2019 Ireland has seen an increase in demand for red cells. Specifically, this demand reflects an increase in the number of patients in Ireland undergoing lifesaving treatments, including urgent surgery, chemotherapy, stem cell transplantation and red cell exchange transfusion, including additional blood requirements to support increased weekend patient treatment activity. In 2024 the IBTS issued the highest number of blood donation units to Irish hospitals in over a decade, at just under 128,500 units, and this exceptionally high demand has further increased during 2025. The IBTS operates within an establishment ceiling of 567 whole time equivalents. This includes 27 additional posts to support the increases in IBTS service delivery that were sanctioned in December 2024 by the Department of Health.

If the national blood supply falls below a certain level a number of steps are taken. The Senator mentioned the pre-amber alert, whereby the IBTS writes to hospitals regarding restricting issues of blood and asking hospitals to reduce their stock holding. This allows the IBTS to more effectively allocate the national supply of blood. The Minister for Health will be alerted if the alert status changes to amber. An amber alert means that elective surgeries requiring donor blood support are cancelled and hospitals are advised to reduce blood usage under the national transfusion advisory group red cell and platelet shortage plans. The IBTS has never issued an amber alert and every effort is made to ensure this continues.

On 15 October, the IBTS issued an appeal for immediate public and donor support to collect more than 12,000 blood donations over the next four weeks to help boost the national blood supply, as current supplies are under three days across most blood groups. This is an issue and I acknowledge the Senator's concerns about this. The IBTS has robust blood shortage mitigations, which include optimising attendance at clinics, increased media and social media, additional targeted text messaging of donors, running multiple additional clinics and having longer opening hours. To support increased collections in response to the appeal, additional Sunday clinics were offered on Sunday 19 October at D’Olier Street in Dublin, St. Finbarr’s Hospital in Cork, Dunboyne in Meath, and Waterford city.These additional Sunday clinics collected an additional 0.7 day's supply overall. I will come back to the Senator with the rest of the reply.