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Edmonton’s Lois Hole Hospital for Women is celebrating the gift of stems cells – a decade’s worth of them.
Since 2015, mothers giving birth at the Royal Alexandra Hospital have the option of donating cord blood.
Cord blood contains potentially life-saving stem cells that can treat more than 80 diseases and disorders including leukemia, lymphoma and sickle cell disease.
The Lois Hole Hospital for Women has collected nearly 9,000 units in a decade.
Delivery nurse and cord blood donor Kelsey Koch was excited to learn her donation was used four years after she gave birth.
“My son wanted to know why I was upset,” Koch said. “I had to tell him I wasn’t upset, I was very happy. I kind of explained the process to him; he was four, almost five, so he didn’t quite grasp it.
“But all he understood was that he was a superhero. That he either saved someone’s life or impacted it in a positive manner.”
After the Canadian Blood Services (CBS) collects a donation, a small amount of the cord blood is tested at the hospital to determine if it has enough stem cells to qualify for storage; cord blood can be stored for a long time before being used.
CBS banks about 16 per cent of the cord blood units collected from their four collection sites in Canada — the other three sites are in Ottawa, Brampton and Vancouver. The remaining units are made available to scientists to support research initiatives across the country.
“It’s a community bank,” explained Dr. Juliette Sacks, and obstetrician at the Lois Hole Hospital. “As opposed to a private bank, it’s not costing them anything, and so they think why not. If they don’t have any personal needs for their placentas, then most of the time they are very happy to participate.”
The cord bank at the Lois Hole Hospital for Women is the only hospital collection site in Alberta. It has the highest cord blood stem cell transplant rate in the country.