Few data relating to aggregate demand and supply are available on an international scale. This is demonstrated, for example, by the inadequacies of the data and the lack of comparability shown in the results of international surveys by the League of Red Cross Societies. Blood transfusion statistics, even for high income countries, are deficient in most respects. Only a limited series of national statistics have been published for England and Wales. In the United States, despite the volume of documentation on individual blood-banking programs, it is hard to establish – let alone reconcile – even national figures for donations, transfusions and usage in general.

What follows, therefore, is only a rough attempt to compare certain data for England and Wales and the United States. (The data for Scotland are similar. Rather than combine them, which would have added to the labours of this study, it was decided to use only data for England and Wales.) Because, in the United States, the problems of organisation are so inextricably bound up with the difficulties of establishing any statistics on supply, they are considered in this chapter. Questions relating to the financial costs of different blood collecting and distributing agencies and the problems of wasted blood are in general dealt with in later chapters. Separate chapters are also devoted to an analysis of the characteristics of blood donors. To avoid confusion, the term donor is generally used throughout the study, despite its inappropriateness in the case of those who are paid to supply blood.

England and Wales

In Table 4.1 we set out the main national statistics for the years 1946-68.

Between the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948 and 1968 the following increases took place:

Increases of this magnitude cannot be attributed to population changes, to increases in the provision of beds and the number of patients treated under the National Health Service, nor to the choice of the base-line year.