Facebook introduces new feature in Pakistan to help increase blood donations

Facebook has launched a blood donations feature across Pakistan to make it easier for people to sign up to be blood donors, and to help connect donors with people and organizations in need.

Pakistan, like many countries, has a shortage of safe blood. In some cases, this shortage means patients and their families are responsible for finding donors to replace the blood they receive from blood banks or hospitals.

This can cause high-stress situations as people try to find blood donors on their own. Many people are reaching out to their networks on social site. There are thousands of posts each month in Pakistan seeking blood donors on Facebook, and over 100,000 people in blood donation groups.

This is where Facebook can help, by finding ways to more efficiently bring blood donors, people and organizations together. We have worked together with non-profit organizations, health industry experts, potential donors and people who have used Facebook to find blood donors to ensure that this feature was designed to be useful to people. We recently launched a similar tool in India and Bangladesh, where nearly 7 million people have signed up to be blood donors on Facebook.

"We hope that by increasing awareness and providing tools for people and organizations in need to connect with those who are willing to help, we can make it easier for people to donate blood," Geo News quoted HemaBudaraju, Head of Product and Health at Facebook.

“Safe Blood Transfusion Programme is proud to work with Facebook. We believe Facebook's Blood Donation feature will help us address a key programmatic challenge for us, that is reaching a younger population of potential donors. We are confident that now this gap will soon become history,” the channel quoted Prof. Hasan Abbas Zaheer.