Dr. Dhaka University in 1997 with the aim of transforming voluntary blood donation into a social movement with the mantra ‘One’s blood is another’s life, blood is the bond of the soul’. Bandhan of Voluntary Blood Donor Organization started the journey from Muhammad Shahidullah Hall.
With the aim of facilitating the search for desired blood donors with the advancement of technology, the silver jubilee pledge was to launch a digital platform for automatic direct connection between blood donors and blood recipients. As a part of this initiative was taken in 2022 to create Bandhan Apps. Bandhan Apps is looking forward to auspicious rise with everyone’s collective efforts.
Bandhan apps are the new addition to the voluntary blood donation movement, through which the beneficiaries can easily and quickly find blood donors themselves. This app will find the necessary blood donor based on the patient’s location from anywhere in the country. Patient’s location should be input in the digital demand form to find the blood donor near the patient’s location. Through these apps, blood donors and blood recipients will benefit by establishing a direct connection between themselves. In the light of 26 years of experience in voluntary blood donation, Bandhan Apps has been developed considering the issues of concern to blood donors and blood recipients; The main focus of which was to connect blood recipient/seeker in less time with minimum sacrifice of blood donor.
About 60,000 blood donors from 64 districts across the country have been inputted in the Bandhan app at the initial stage and this number is increasing every day and will continue to grow. Every year new blood donors will be added to this app from the freshers of the units that have bandh activities. Also those who register to search for blood donors can also include themselves as blood donors. Thus the number of blood donors will continue to increase through the registration of beneficiaries. Along with the blood donor information, 2000 hospitals of 64 districts across the country have been stored in the app’s database. The app’s searching algorithm is designed in such a way that the blood donor will be searched by considering the geolocation of the hospitals and the current address of the blood donor to find the blood donor in less time. As a result blood donors will be sought from among those staying around the hospital where the patient is being treated.
To search for blood donors, first install the app from Play Store/App Store and register with some details. There are two types of registration system.
QUICK REGISTRATION: Blood donors/ blood seekers who are not fit to donate blood themselves or are unable to donate can do quick registration to seek blood. However, if you want to donate blood later, you can include yourself as a blood donor by updating some additional information.
Full Registration: In case of full registration, add 2/3 more details along with current address. A full registrant will be considered as a potential blood donor.
For blood donor search, the blood recipient/seeker first login to the Bandhan app and after providing the required blood group and hospital details, the app will automatically provide the details of 5 blood donors. If the desired blood donor is not found after clicking on the displayed number, 5 more donors will be added. In this way the blood collector/searcher will get the information of maximum 25 persons at a time. Even if the required blood donor is not found then the demand will be automatically transferred to the nearest binding unit as per the hospital address and the concerned unit will try to collect the required blood from its donor list.
Bandhan app has blood donor reservation (booking) system. A user can book a blood donor up to 7 days in advance in case of emergency. After the booking date is over, the reserved blood donor will come back to the list of blood donors and will come under search.
To avoid repeated calls to ineligible (120 days since previous blood donation) donors, special feature has been added to the app whereby the blood donor/ blood recipient/ seeker fills the mandatory notification for updating blood donation information within the next 24 hours, the blood donation information will be updated and the blood donor Avoid receiving repeated calls.
A blood donor can temporarily/automatically exclude himself/herself from the blood donation list in case of illness and emergency. A blood donor can remain exempt from the search by excluding himself from the list of eligible blood donors for a certain period of time.
Geolocation based search of blood donors and blood recipients will soon be added to this app. As a result, the current “location” of the blood donor will be considered instead of the current and permanent address.
