---
name: blood-donation-assessment
description: Use when asked to administer, score, or explain a Blood Donation Assessment — eligibility screening aligned with UK NHSBT's JPAC Donor Selection Guidelines — grounded in FormExamples/form-examples.
---

# Blood Donation Assessment

Blood donation eligibility screening aligned with the JPAC Donor
Selection Guidelines used by UK NHSBT, covering donor demographics,
health status, medications, recent illness, travel history, lifestyle
risk, and vital signs to determine donation eligibility.

## Scoring

**Instrument:** JPAC Donor Selection Guidelines (DSG).

- **Eligible** — no deferral criteria triggered.
- **Temporarily Deferred** — time-limited deferral (e.g. recent travel,
  recent illness, pregnancy).
- **Permanently Deferred** — lifelong deferral (e.g. certain
  infections, CJD risk, some medication histories).

## What it covers

Donor demographics; general health and wellbeing; medical history
(chronic conditions, medications); recent illness and infections;
travel history (malaria, West Nile virus, vCJD risk areas); lifestyle
and risk behaviours; pregnancy and transfusion history; vital signs
(haemoglobin, blood pressure, pulse); informed consent; and the
donation plan.

## Common pitfalls

- **Confusing temporary and permanent deferral** — a temporarily
  deferred donor may be eligible again later; treating it as a
  permanent exclusion loses a future donor unnecessarily.
- **Missing travel-related deferral windows** — malaria and other
  travel-related deferrals have specific time windows that are easy to
  miscalculate without checking current JPAC guidance.
- **Applying outdated deferral criteria** — donor selection guidelines
  are periodically revised (for example around travel-risk areas or
  behavioural risk criteria); verify against the current JPAC edition.

## Learn more

- [FormExamples: blood-donation-assessment](https://github.com/FormExamples/form-examples/tree/main/forms/blood-donation-assessment) for the full implementation, clinical references, and worked examples.
- [[bone-marrow-donation-assessment]], [[organ-donation-assessment]] for related donation-eligibility assessments.