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I'm also a current blood services employee. The allegations in this review are pretty accurate. Since I don't work in Pomona, I can't speak to those particular statements, but it's true that we work under incredible pressure.

Recently, a new system for setting up and breaking down blood drives at places where we actually go inside the building to hold the blood drive, was instituted. The collection staff are now required to meet the truck hauling the equipment and help unload the supplies and equipment, then reload the handtrucks and take them back out to the truck. Often this necessitates pushing heavily loaded carts up or down steep ramps. At some sites, the carts have to be unloaded at elevators and reloaded when they arrive at the desired floor. All set up from unloading to receiving first donor must be completed within 45 minutes. Breakdown must also be completed within 45 minutes. If the drive doesn't open on time or it takes longer to reload the supplies and equipment, charge nurse must make a written statement as to why. We were never properly trained to perform these tasks and several staff have been injured. One has been out for six months due to having an overloaded hand truck collapse on him. Our "training" consisted of 3 ten minute videos giving a vague description of each of the steps to be performed.

Equipment and vehicles are old and not maintained properly. There have been complaints about illnesses being caused by mold inside air conditioning units and staff are told that the units are maintained and checked on a regular basis. Several Self Contained Units (bloodmobiles) do not have working stabilizers or jacks to keep them level and secure when sitting on uneven ground. When someone steps on or off the vehicle, the whole thing shakes as if there's an earthquake. There have been several instances where this occured at the moment of a venipuncture and the staff missed the donor's vein, necessitating an "adjustment" and even a case of the needle going through the vein which resulted in a huge bruise. Generators that provide electricity are often breaking down causing slow downs and erroneous draw times because there was no power or connectivity to the master computer.

We've had incidents where donors have behaved inappropriately with staff and no action was taken. At a high school, a charge nurse had a coach get in her face and literally scream at her to get her staff and equipment out of the building so he could conduct his PE class.

If a donor complains about a staff member, management ALWAYS assumes the accusation is true and the employee is disciplined accordingly. This might be in the form of "counseling" and the employee must sign a document indicating they were counseled about the matter and it goes in their permanent file. Or the employee could be suspended. In one incident a male staff member was accused of asking for a female high school student's phone number. She reported to her teacher that this made her "uncomfortable", even though it is standard that we get demographic info on every donor. She later recanted her story and said it was a "joke". But the employee was still suspended and very nearly lost his job. There was never an apology and the staff member has been unable to confirm that the incident has been expunged from his record.

One staff member asked if her schedule could be modified because of changes in her children's school hours. The request was denied and she was told "maybe this isn't the job for you." There are many, many incidents where staff are not given sufficient "turn around time"...the time from when you clock out for the day and the time when you have to clock back in...and they don't count commute time in there. You could clock out at 9:00 pm and have to drive three hours to get home, then have to be back on the job at 5:00 am. That the staff member is sleep deprived and at risk for having a car accident or making mistakes on the job (which can impact donor and blood recipient safety) are of no import to management.

If a staff member is pregnant or has an injury that prevents them from performing even one step in the assigned tasks, they are told they cannot work. There is no such thing as light or modified duty. The general feeling among staff I've spoken to is that we are pieces of equipment and if we are not fit for work and can't be "fixed" then we are not needed. We even have an ID number that is identical to our equipment ID's.

There is also the added pressure of production numbers. You are given a print out each month of how many donors you registered, how many health histories you performed, how many phlebotomies and how many donors you completed. Some people can perform each of these tasks at a very quick pace, and some are slower. If your manager sees that you're not performing at the expected pace, you are counseled and told to speed it up. They don't take into consideration that everyone has their own pace where they work at peak efficiency. They just want MORE.

If they think you are deferring too many donors (not letting them donate for some reason), then you get counseled. It doesn't matter that the donors were deferred for a valid reason such as being in malaria risk area or because their hemoglobin was too low. (Often we go to churches whose congregation members go on mission trips to malaria risk zones or we hold blood drives in areas where nutrition is insufficient and there are high numbers of people who are anemic).

If charge nurses develop a good rapport with their staff, they are told by management not to become "familiar" with the staff. They are told to be harsher and stricter so that the staff develops a fear of that nurse. The assumption is that the staff will perform better when they feel they are being "watched".

It's a common joke that ARC stands for "Always Ready for Change". Sadly, it's NOT a joke. What is standard procedure one day, can be a reason to be written up the next. For example: in order to cut costs, for a short time, the Red Cross decided that only first time donors were to be tested for Chagas Disease, a serious, incurable blood parasite. Staff were instructed to mark the tops of the appropriate tubes with a Sharpie marker. Failure to do so was sufficient grounds to be written up with a "problem report". Now, they're changed their minds and decided that ALL samples should be tested for this serious disease and marking the tubes is no longer necessary. But those write ups are still in the employees records.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. This situation has become so critical, that in some areas, employees who were non-union, decided to vote in favor of unionizing. The intimidation tactics before the election were downright scary and even after the union was voted in, management resorted to all kinds of intimidation tactics in hopes that the employees would change their minds.

Reason of review: Poor customer service.

Preferred solution: Let the company propose a solution.

Location: Escondido, California

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Short staffed, overworked, no breaks, donors complain, write ups and complaints against staff filed for future ammunition. Adversarial relationships between departments, blame games, short turn around times, injuries classified as idiopathic, firings for workman comp claims. Management blocks union activities, not allowing employees to organize.

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