Bio-Rad Employee Fights Global Blood Shortage Through Blood Drives
December 21, 2023
Stephanie J. Wong, center, poses with Bio-Rad colleagues Sean Lee (left) and Mark Cobianchi (right) after a Dec. 9, 2023 blood drive with the Blood Bank of Hawaii.
The stories began flooding in at the height of the pandemic. Stephanie J. Wong, a Senior Account Manager for Bio-Rad's Clinical Diagnostics Group, heard them in online forums and in interactions with her customers: Blood banks and hospital laboratories were running out of blood.
“There was a blood banker that posted, ‘How bad has the shortage been for you? Have you had to decide who to save?’” Stephanie says. “No laboratory professional should ever have to be in that situation, so that inspired me to become a blood donor myself. The global shortage continues.”
In 2022, Stephanie began exploring ways to leverage Bio-Rad's longstanding reputation in the healthcare industry to better the situation. In 2023, she helped organize five separate blood drives either on a Bio-Rad campus or at an external event where Bio-Rad had a presence. In total, there has been enough blood collected at these events to save roughly 534 lives!
Bio-Rad employees at a Blood Drive held at the Company's Hercules, California headquarters on July 13, 2023.
At the first blood drive she organized at Bio-Rad's headquarters in Hercules, 58 Bio-Rad employees donated. Stanford Blood Center, who processed the donations, said afterward that it was one of the most successful blood drives they’ve ever ran.
Stephanie kept this momentum going throughout the year, culminating in two blood drives in December, including one at the Aiea Christmas Parade in partnership with the Blood Bank of Hawaii.
Laboratory professionals attend the Aiea Christmas Parade on Dec. 9, 2023.
Her goal at the event was to promote blood donation and spotlight laboratory professionals she works with in Hawaii. "At the heart of every lab is community. As a partner of all labs within the state, I wanted to unify laboratory professionals and help promote their field of work as they are often unspoken heroes in healthcare. There is also a shortage of workers in this field globally. We had about 150 people representing the laboratory community in the parade!”
Where does her passion come from? Stephanie says that caring for her customers is just something she’s learned to do throughout her 20-year career at Bio-Rad. “We've always been a company that takes care of people like we want to be taken care of, and there aren't many companies that treat our customers as well as we do,” Stephanie says. “So I thought, ‘this would be a good opportunity for us to help the laboratory community in a big way.’”
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