Blood collection appointments moving online

Booking for blood collection appointments in Nova Scotia are going online.

This comes after some people complained about long waits and busy signals when trying to book their appointments over the phone.

The Nova Scotia Health Authority is working to have all 63 blood collection sites in the province setup for online booking before the end of the year.

Previously, only the Woodlawn Blood Clinic in Dartmouth and the Colchester East Hants Centre in Truro took online bookings.

Starting today, that list expands to the Dartmouth General Hospital and the Lloyd E. Matheson Centre in Elmsdale. 

Shauna Thompson is the senior director of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the NSHA, and she tells the Sheldon MacLeod Show, people can check intermittently to see if their preferred site is set up for online bookings.

“The issues that we’ve been seeing, I mean it’s across the entire province, but we’re trying to get the locations that seem to have the biggest trouble getting to the phone lines, get them rolled out first,” she says.

Appointments will still be taken by phone, and this will help free up some of the phone operators that were hired in August after blood collection calls hit almost 50,000 in one week. 

“You’ll see updates as we start rolling this out to new sites as we go forward, so we’re really excited to finally see this come to fruition. It’s much needed in all our communities across the province,” says Thompson.

Online bookings will also open up in the future for diagnostic imaging and x-rays.

Blood collection bookings can be done at http://booking.nshealth.ca