Welsh Blood Service HbS Testing

The Welsh Blood Service is commissioned by LHBs to be the supplier of blood components for customer hospitals across NHS Wales and plays a fundamental part in the delivery of healthcare in Wales. The Service aims to ensure that the donor’s gift of blood is transformed into safe and effective blood components, which allow NHS Wales to improve the quality of life and save the lives of many thousands of people in Wales every year.

Red cells from those donors with sickle cell trait can be safely transfused into most patients, except those with sickle cell disease (SCD), neonates, and paediatrics, due to the higher risk of red cell sickling, resulting in patient harm.

The Welsh Blood Service are seeking to procure two high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysers (it is envisaged this will be via a Managed Service Contract) to screen approximately 6000 donors per year for HbS in the following cohorts:

• Approximately 5000 whole blood donors selected for neonatal use.
• An additional 1000 units per year, selected for extended phenotypes for Haemoglobinopathies patients.

We invite interested parties to express their interest in this procurement by email to nwssp.procurementcataloguepathology@wales.nhs.uk no later than 17:00hrs Friday 14th February 2025. We aim to hold pre-tender engagement with interested parties by means of either a face to face session or virtually using Microsoft Teams in February/March 2025 to discuss requirements to help shape the specification further.

Please note this engagement is in order to shape a business case, and at this stage does not guarantee that a procurement exercise will follow as this will depend on funding being secured.