As health-care procedures change and once-delicate surgeries become more routine, the need for a stable blood supply increases. A new building for the American Red Cross blood services division in Cape Girardeau will help make that possible.

The building at 20 S. Mount Auburn Road more than tripled the amount of space the center once had and allows it to hold regular blood drives and open donation times.

Blood donor collections rose between 3 percent and 4 percent last year, but the demand for blood products rose by 9 percent, said David Palmer, recruitment manager for the Red Cross.

The American Red Cross supplies half the nation's blood supply. The Missouri-Illinois service region serves 120 counties and 26 hospitals locally. Almost one-fifth of the blood collected in the service region is used in Southeast Missouri. The territory covers an area from Fredericktown and Farmington to the Arkansas border in the Bootheel.

Opening a donor center in Cape Girardeau gives people an opportunity to donate regularly at the same location, Palmer said.

Unless a mobile blood drive can collect between 25 and 30 units of whole blood products, it's not really feasible for the Red Cross to staff, he said. That restriction ends with the opening of a donation center. Now small groups or clubs that want to sponsor a drive can send their members to the center.

"It gives us more flexibility," Palmer said. The Red Cross will continue to hold drives sponsored by churches, schools and hospitals, but the regularly scheduled drives, like the monthly ones held Wednesday at the Cape Girardeau Senior Center, are ending.

Palmer said the center, being in a visible location, should help attract new donors and provides an opportunity for people to come and help as they can.

The open drives will begin July 1, but some appointments are available now each Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

It doesn't matter much to Charles "Woody" Woodford where he donates blood. He's a card-carrying donor who's given 81 pints of blood.

"There's been so many different spots. We've been to the bank and some at the mall," he said. Having a regular donation location will make it nice, he added.

Cheryl Braeuner, a nurse with the Red Cross, said the new building won't make much difference in how the staff does its job during blood drives. But it will keep the equipment in the same location.

"It just means we don't carry the equipment and set it up," she said. "It doesn't change much of what we do at a drive."

Another advantage of the donation center is that it allows the Red Cross to collect platelets and plasma from donors using a Trima machine. The machine can calculate exactly what sort of product a person can donate based on some inputed health information, height and weight. It also tracks what sort of donation was last made.

The machine allows the Red Cross to isolate needed blood products like plasma instead of collecting a whole unit of blood, sending it back to the lab for testing and separation, and then shipping it to a hospital.

The plasma and platelets are used regularly by cancer patients in their treatments. Having a single donor of plasma instead of several random donors mixed together for a transfusion also helps.

Red Cross employees regularly call area hospitals to make sure that adequate blood supplies are maintained. Each day, employees call different hospitals to check the supplies, making sure that older products nearing expiration dates are circulated to hospitals more likely to use them.

"We don't send anything back," said Peggy Kitchen, supervisor for hospital services. "It's all used in this area."

ljohnston@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126