It started in one room, after clinic hours
The Burhani Blood Bank began in 1997 as an evening venture by young community medical students. It became a thalassaemia centre because the parents of one child came asking for help.
-
1997 The beginning
An evening venture
Community medical students run a one-room blood bank in their own time.
-
The turn
A family asks for help
The parents of a thalassaemic child approach the founders. Nowhere else was set up for regular transfusions.
-
The centre
A thalassaemia centre opens
Transfusion beds, iron chelation and infusion pumps alongside the blood bank.
-
Today
~200 patients transfused
Screened blood, awareness seminars, and advocacy for pre-marital screening.
How we started
A small one-room blood bank, until one family asked
A small one-room blood bank it was, until the helpless parents of a child from within the community approached the bank with an aspiration. The young doctors pledged to do their best — which at the time meant providing properly screened blood for transfusion to that little child. It aroused an urgent need among them to create a thalassaemia centre, where these little souls would find their right to live.
A well-planned and structured thalassaemia centre started taking shape. As the members began taking registrations, within no time a list of helpless little children portrayed their wish to live, in the form of registrations.
His Excellency Mr. Mamnoon Hussain, who in the 1990s served as the Governor of Sindh, inaugurated the premises — constructed meticulously to fulfil a dream, a vision that gleamed in our eyes.
It has been an uphill task, as voluntary blood from family donors was sparse and red liquid was sold on the streets in the name of blood. Since then the registrations have only doubled: people who walk in through the gates with a hope to live.
How we run the bank
Many a time, running this project — fulfilling the needs of life — seems worthless and taken for granted. Words of appreciation hardly come through, and the realities are a scarcity of funds and donor numbers that stay stubbornly low. But in these times, with our faith beating strongly within our hearts, we watch the robust high tide, then watch the waters disappear at low tide, knowing for certain the waves will come back. And so, with our team of dedicated doctors, technicians, administrators and well-wishers, we continue to strive relentlessly to do our best.
Machinery at its best
Knowledge, experience and expertise gained from countries across the globe, where control of thalassaemia has been successful, is applied here. It is what allows the Burhani Blood Bank to run a full-fledged laboratory, equipped with current technology and held to international standards.
Our vision
“A Pakistan freed of the troubles of thalassaemia is a vision every member of the BBB envisages and works relentlessly to bring alive.”
Who runs the centre
The blood bank is a project of the Burhani Medical Welfare Association, which has run it since 1997. It is staffed by the association’s own doctors, technicians and administrators, and it operates under the Sindh Blood Transfusion Authority — the provincial body that licenses blood banks in Sindh.
-
S
Dr. Saud
Contact physician
Operated by
Burhani Medical Welfare Association (BMWA)
Regulator
Listed on the Sindh Blood Transfusion Authority locator
Often confused with
Burhani Hospital, Saddar, and the Rawalpindi Burhani association — both separate bodies