Press Releases

Paying for Blood

No incentives, but you can bank on our safe blood

Patients in South Africa, like in other countries across the world, do not pay for the blood they receive. What they pay for is the actual costs incurred to collect, test, transportation and storage of the blood.

The South African National Blood Service (SANBS) is a non-profit making organisation and does not receive funds from government. It operates under licence from the Department of Health, but it is not state-owned.

When a patient receives a blood transfusion in a state-owned hospital, the cost incurred is recovered from the Department of Health. However, if a patient receives blood in a private hospital, the patient must settle the bill or send it through to his/her medical aid scheme for payment. This is an international standard of practice.

SANBS cannot remunerate any person for donating blood as it has been proven in other countries that people, who get rewarded for their donation, donate blood for the wrong reasons.

In terms of the South African Human Tissues Act all blood donations must be made for altruistic reasons only, with no expectation of reward.

SANBS has various safety measures in place to keep its blood safe. One of these is to collect blood from voluntary, non-remunerated blood donors only.

In an effort to ensure that the SANBS supplies hospitals with quality and safe blood, the organization has acquired the most sophisticated technology to test each unit of blood individually for sexually transmissible diseases, HIV, Hepatitis B & C and Syphilis. This technology has been acquired at a great cost to ensure that the patients receive the safest possible blood.

The World Health Organisation has proven that these donors are the safest and wants all countries to move to a system such as South Africa’s by the year 2012.