Not for the squimish, Event planning part 1

It's been a few weeks since I previously posted on the blog, things have been busy for myself as whenever I would like to write about my day at work. I tend to leave it until after work, which by then I'm terribly exhausted and uninterested in looking at my computer. Therefore I find myself trying to compile all the things I have done over the weeks which I have not posted anything.


Day by day

So what exactly has been keeping me so busy lately?

Well, I was tasked to approach our local general hospital and establish contact with them to organize a charity event for the month of December 2012. In contacting them I was directed to thier Public Relations officer representative, who quickly spoke about donors and blood drives. It was a long conversation which ended with me providing blood for them. This was the very first time I had given blood away or even thought of participating in a blood donation. However since I was about to run my own blood donation event I might as well give it a try.

Around 30 minutes later, a pine of blood was produce and I am left drained. Having blood taken from you can be a very odd experience, which leaves you feeling either exhausted or refresehed (as I was told by my manager). I personally felt exhausted, and actually wondered who has gone to the extent of giving thier sweat and blood for thier internship.

The one other thing I wondered about was my blood type, having never tested my blood before I was curious to find out what I was made of. According to the nurse I was a AB positive type, which was not as rare or as common as other types of blood.

 After that exercise, I couldn’t really move therefore I sat down in the office for little longer and started talking to the PR officer again. Having explained how I felt and also explaining that I have a moderately common blood type. It made me curious as to how long the blood can be kept in the hospital before it is thrown away due to expiry. She then explained that due to the resources at hand in our local hospital. The blood collected from the month it is extracted from donors, only last up to a month. In which after a month has passed, the hospital may be in shortage due to a lacking of donors. I was then told that even with say 600 donors giving their blood. Roughly 6 of those who have donated their blood can be considered usable by the hospital. She then explained that donors who are frequent, are only allowed to donate blood once every three months as it would take that long to completely produce enough blood for another donation.

Having understood, I was more determined to make the blood donation in December a great success for both the company I was representing and also to save lives.

Overall the entire experience was very unique and I felt as though I made a difference in someone’s world that day. In my next post I shall talk about the planning and venue selection for the event.