Blood bank seeks home

"We're really worried, as of now we have nowhere to go," Blood Centers spokeswoman Lisa Bloch said on Monday.

Mills-Peninsula Medical Center uses blood from the bank, and Dr. Rick Navarro, a trustee on the Peninsula Health Care District board, said Monday it is to the hospital's advantage to have blood close by.

Blood Centers of the Pacific Trustee Dr. Jenta Shen told Navarro recently he was concerned about what would happen to the blood-drawing center after it moves.

Navarro, an anaesthesiologist at Seton Medical Center in Daly City, said heart surgeons at Seton have waited for blood to be driven in an ambulance from the Burlingame center.

The Peninsula Health Care District is expected to control the new hospital buildings after completion around 2009, and until then cannot directly promise a new site on the new hospital's perimeter buildings

However, Peninsula Health Care District Chairman Don Newman said one of the seven buildings near Trousdale Drive the district will control could possibly be used for the blood bank.

No one from the bank had approached him recently, he said.

The new hospital, which could now cost as much as $450 million, is slated to be built on the El Camino Real edge of the property where the blood bank now stands.

About 50 donors contribute a pint of blood each day at the blood bank, Bloch said, and the bank has been looking for possible locations from San Francisco to the South Bay.

When the bank moves out, the closest blood banks will be in Redwood City and near the University of California at San Francisco.

Half the blood the center receives is donated at schools and places of worship from mobile teams the center dispatches, Bloch said.

On May 22, 1942 it opened as the San Mateo County Blood Bank and tested and stored blood. It merged with Irwin Memorial Blood Centers in 1997 and was renamed Blood Centers of the Pacific.

Blood is drawn there and stored in two buildings in San Francisco, Bloch said.

Mills-Peninsula Health Services representatives were unavailable for comment.

Stephen Baxter can be reached by e-mail at stephen@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: (650) 344-5200 ext. 109. What do you think of this story? Send a letter to the editor: letters@smdailyjournal.com.