MDA-ED2 PhotoBook P001-096 FIN 02 Spreads With Covers - Flipbook - Page 11
Photo: MDA
Diversity
“We work together;
we live together.
This is our life.”
National Blood
And Logistics Centre
ZOHER ABU JAMA
Avraham Mintz, a Jew from Beersheba, and Zoher Abu Jama,
an Arab from nearby Rahat, pray together by their ambulance.
Photo: MDA
The World Health Organisation sets out requirements for nations to be selfsufcient with supplies of blood. This is dened as sufcient stocks for 4% of the
population. At the time of writing, Israel only holds sufcient blood supplies for 3%.
Perhaps a more important issue is that the current building is vulnerable to
potential attack. Its systems remain vulnerable to cyber-attack. It is not built
to survive an earthquake.
DIVERSITY
MDA ambulance
decicated in honour of
HRH Prince William,
The Duke of Cambridge.
10
Centre under construction
– January 2021
To address these problems, work began, in 2019, on a new £90m building,
featuring an underground blood bank. Israel will be the only nation in the world
to have a blood bank sited underground, protected from missiles, chemical or
biological attack. The new storage facility will also be safe from earthquakes.
At the time of writing, MDA was close to competing construction of this
new National Blood and Logistics Centre, located in Ramla, in Central Israel.
The project is a partnership between MDA UK, American Friends of MDA
(AFMDA) and the Israeli government.
Three of the six oors of the new building are underground. Blood donations,
training and administration will continue above ground, with laboratories,
as well as the storage and processing of blood, in a high specication,
subterranean environment.
N AT I O N A L B L O O D A N D L O G I S T I C S C E N T R E
Blood is currently stored at the Sheba Medical Centre in Tel Hashomer, in the
Tel Aviv area. Ranked as the 9th best hospital in the world by Newsweek in
2020, the facility, which was built in 1985, is struggling to cope with current
demands. Designed to serve a population of 5 million people, the blood unit
now serves almost 9 million.
Photo: MDA
11
