Your digest

Townhall recording now available: Thank you to everyone who joined us live for yesterday’s Q&A with our CEO. If you couldn’t make it, the recording is now available on your COVID-19 employee portal. With government restrictions rising across the country, Graham and our guest presenters answered employee questions focused on our operations, priority access to vaccines, and return to office, amoung others. We will be doing our best to ensure that questions/topics we were unable to get to be answered via the “question of the day” in Your Digest. As always, if you have questions, please send them to us at communications@blood.ca.

‘Asking for help is actually one of the most responsible things we can do’: Many of us are experiencing unprecedented mental health challenges in our personal lives; or are close to someone who is. It is more important than ever that we as friends and colleagues break the stigma and have open discussions about the effects of mental health and how to manage them while continuing to live in an uncertain climate. Ahead of the live conversations that will be taking place as part of Bell Let’s Talk Day, we spoke with licensed counsellor Yasmine Sikender, one of two counsellors available to employees through our virtual drop-in therapy program. Together, we discussed how to ask for help, how to overcome stigma attached to mental health, and how to manage feelings of isolation, anxiety, depression and burnout. Whether you are personally experiencing mental health challenges or are helping someone close to you with theirs, we hope you will take five minutes out of your day to read this important article on Connect.

Our chief scientist Dr. Dana Devine takes on directorship at Centre for Blood Research: Dr. Devine has been appointed director of the Centre for Blood Research at the University of British Columbia in addition to her current role as our chief scientist. This new role deepens Canadian Blood Services’ lasting collaboration with the centre and is part of Dr. Devine’s longstanding pursuit of bringing new discoveries to patients in meaningful ways. “As one of the founders of the Centre for Blood Research, I’ve watched it grow over the years. In some ways, it feels like I’m coming full circle,” says Dr. Devine. “It’s one of the largest academic blood centres in the world, and one of the most multidisciplinary.” Read more about how Dr. Devine hopes to use her new role to advance patient care on blood.ca/stories.

Question of the day: With restrictions rising across the country, do we have plans to limit the number of appointments in our collection events?

Safety has always been our highest priority, and we are constantly monitoring how public health guidance, rising cases, government restrictions and hospital demand affects the number of donor appointments in our collection events.

Enhanced wellness measures are in effect throughout all our donor centres, including wellness checkpoints, mandatory masks, enhanced cleaning and strict physical distancing. We work closely with public health authorities to ensure that our measures help limit infection to our donors, volunteers and employees. Further to these measures, we’ve done a lot of work to ensure that our donor events are set up to support physical distancing. For example, where needed, additional barriers have been installed.

The continuous improvement and planning teams work closely together to ensure that the number of daily donor appointments can support our safety measures and meet hospital demand. With our colleagues in medical affairs and innovation, and our hospital liaison specialists, we are closely monitoring this demand, and at this time do not anticipate a drop like we experienced in March/April of last year.

We all must do our part to keep our teams and donors safe. If you have concerns that physical distancing measures are not able to be respected at your site, we encourage you to bring your concerns directly to your manager/supervisor for further attention.

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About your digest

This digest will highlight the latest policy and employee support measures, resources to help you manage our new reality and original content like articles and videos to remind us that what we do matters.  No access to email? No problem — all this information and more can be found on blood.ca/employees from any device, no login required.    

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Have questions? Check out blood.ca/employees or email us at communications@blood.ca