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In an effort to explain why certain communities consistently meet or exceed their collection quotas while others consistently fail, the authors analyzed 50 Ohio counties within the Northern Ohio Red Cross Blood Program and the Columbus Regional Blood Program of the American Red Cross. They measured collection and usage rates, and 18 sociological, demographic and economic dimensions for each county. They found that the best predictor of community collections was the amount of blood used by county residents during that year. Population and population density were also significantly correlated with collection rates. However, education, economic complexity, birth rate, health indices, living conditions and population age, etc., all failed to show a relationship to collection rates when population and usage were removed from the analysis by partial regression technic. Moreover, in the Columbus region less than 5 per cent of the available population gave blood in voluntary blood programs. The general conclusions of this research were that on a macroscopic basis the prime motivation for community donation is its use of whole blood. All of the economic, sociological and demographic factors investigated failed to explain why one community would produce so much more blood than another. Therefore, this might support the belief of community blood workers that the primary factor responsible for adequate collections of whole blood is the organization and leadership of those individuals responsible for the blood program within the community.
Rockwell et al. (Tue,) studied this question.