Over the years, we have witnessed cases where lives of People are lost as a result of inexplicable delay in finding safe blood as at when needed especially during emergencies. These unfortunate and painful loss of lives has brought not just untold sorrow and grief to Families but doesn’t speak well about the Nigerian health sector. Situations where Blood is needed urgently and nowhere to be found closeby could be very tensed.

As Blood can neither be manufactured nor be substituted or put into use after expiration, it becomes imperative for Blood Banks to have high turnover of Blood donated and kept in their Banks. Having in mind that someone somewhere needs Blood every 2 seconds and about 2 in 15 people entering the hospital each day needs Blood, it cannot be over-emphasized how important it is to bridge the gap between the Blood Banks and the Patients for successful Blood transfusion thereby saving Lives.

The impact of the huge time taken to get Blood is mostly felt during emergencies like major motor accident, patient battling with Cancer, hemophiliacs, surgeries, infants, Terrorist attacks and more.

Red bank is that platform that bridges the gap by erasing the difficulty of finding blood for hospitals and individuals.

It is a location aware application that leverages on the power of Short Message Service (SMS), to make blood available in shorter space of time to hospitals and individuals that request for them using SMS.

HOW IT WORKS.

There’s a  central inventory built for all the blood banks. This helps the bloodbanks easily upload and update their daily blood  records.

Hospitals / patients in need of blood in emergency cases send an SMS  to a shortcode (35070) in the following format:

‘BLD, blood group, blood pints needed, Local Government Area, State’  e.g  BLD, AB+, 5, Alimosho, Lagos to 35070

Based on this SMS request, Redbank service will return an SMS response with the closest blood banks to the user requesting for blood.

They can then contact and go to the bloodbank to get this blood.