The American Red cross has declared a national blood supply crisis.

This is only the second time blood donations have dropped low enough for the organization to issue such a warning.

In Kentucky, a drop in blood donations and an increase in the number of blood transfusions has left the Kentucky Blood Center unable to fill all of its hospital orders.

When we spoke to the center on Friday, donations were low, and not being able to fulfill hospital orders was a concern.

The American Red cross certainly does partner with hospitals here in Kentucky, but when folks go to hospitals here in central Kentucky or eastern Kentucky, that blood is almost certainly coming from us, unfortunately for our industry.

What we're feeling right now in August, in terms of our levels, it's pretty normal, actually, for the summertime, which again, we would like to change that trend.

But we often, we often experience a strain in August.

For a couple reasons.

One, summertime schools aren't in session, high schools and colleges, and that makes up a big chunk of our, mobile collections.

We get about 20% of our mobile collections.

That's where we go out into the community.

Or we continue to collect blood.

We're not obviously collected over the past few months.

Their frequency drops off during the summer months.

People are busier.

They're traveling summer vacations.

So we see those numbers drop down.

We're not collected in high schools all at the same time, when we are usually seeing higher transfusion rates from our hospitals.

Summertime is trauma season.

People are driving more, they're more active, which unfortunately means more traumas, which means higher transfusion rates.

So what I'm getting at is essentially we see two numbers going in opposite directions.

We're seeing fewer donations at a time when the hospitals we work with are asking for more blood.

So it does historically we you know, we feel the strain this time of the year.

Now we are currently in low supply of o-negative o positive and negative blood.

When we say low supply, that means that we have about it a day a days inventory of blood to supply those hospitals.

So if I'll use UK healthcare for example, since they use a lot of blood from us, if UK healthcare, has a really busy day there with transfusions and calls and has a huge order of products that they need, we give them those products and then we get a call from 3 or 4 other hospitals, said that we might not have enough blood to supply them.

What that does to them, then, is they have some difficult decisions to make.

You know, they might have to limit, you know, someone, for example, may need four pints of blood and they may only be able to provide them to or they may have surgeries on, you know, on the docket that they might have to to postpone or cancel.

We never want to put them in that position.

We want to make sure that the blood is always available.

It's our responsibility.

But I would argue it's the greater responsibility of Kentuckians and donors to step up to make sure when blood is needed.

It's always there.

Today.