---
title: "CPMC Staff Roll Up Sleeves to Fight Blood Shortage | Sutter Health"
description: "During the Year of the Nurse, CPMC doctors, nurses and staff donated blood to help ease a national shortage worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic."
url: "https://vitals.sutterhealth.org/community-impact/nurses-give-blood"
---

1.  [Home](https://vitals.sutterhealth.org/) /
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3.  Nurses Give Blood

# Nurses Give Blood, Encourage Others to Give

During the Year of the Nurse, CPMC doctors, nurses and staff donated blood to help ease a national shortage worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

May 15, 2020

SAN FRANCISCO – During 2020’s [Year of the Nurse and the Midwife](https://www.who.int/news-room/campaigns/year-of-the-nurse-and-the-midwife-2020), front-line workers at Sutter’s California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) continue to give back.

At the hospital’s Van Ness campus in San Francisco, healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses and staff, took part in a blood drive hosted by Vitalant.

The drive was open to all Sutter employees and held in a large conference room to allow for social distancing.

Interventional radiology technologist **Lauren Hamilton** said while donating, “I always try to give blood as often as I can. You can save multiple people’s lives in one donation.”

Nearly 60,000 units of red blood cells are transfused in patients across Sutter Health each year. Donated red blood cells do not last forever; they have a shelf-life of up to 42 days.

There is currently a national blood shortage due to COVID-19, which is why CPMC continues to host blood drives at least once a quarter.

“It’s incredibly important and a very easy way to give back to society,” beamed Hamilton, who has the universal Type O blood.

According to [The American Red Cross](https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/blood-types/o-blood-type.html), O negative is the most common blood type used for transfusions when the blood type is unknown. For this reason, it’s used most often in cases of trauma, emergency, surgery and any situation where blood type is unknown.

[California Pacific Medical Center](https://www.sutterhealth.org/cpmc), part of Sutter’s not-for-profit integrated network of care, has three campuses in San Francisco: Davies, Mission Bernal and Van Ness. CPMC’s state-of-the-art Van Ness campus hospital opened in March 2019.

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