Missing Minorities – A survey based description of the current state of minority blood donor recruitment across 23 countries

Due to increasing migration, blood collection establishments are increasingly required to supply blood for patients from different ethnic backgrounds many blood donation organisations in Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States are not yet very successful in recruiting and retaining donors from minority groups. This paper also reports on the different methods of minority blood donor recruitment which have been used by the organisations. These methods require more systematic research in order to verify the findings of the most successful strategies identified in this paper. Overall, this paper can be seen as a first step towards better recruitment methods by showing the current situation, but it is also as a call for more research on the topic.