Emergency Medicine Department Chair Makes 100th Hoxworth Blood Donation

When your job calls for working with units of blood each and every day, you realize how important of a product blood is. That’s one reason why Art Pancioli, MD, Professor and Richard C. Levy Chair of Emergency Medicine at the UC College of Medicine recently made his 100th donation at Hoxworth Blood Center.

"I use these products all the time to try to save lives and this is a product that you cannot manufacture, and absolutely has to be available,” says Pancioli. "It’s incumbent upon all of us to make the effort and make it available. You never know when it’s going to be you or your family member in need of blood.”

Pancioli started donating blood at the end of his residency and decided to make it a habit. It took him 20 years to make it to the triple digit donation level. "You can only give a maximum of every eight weeks, so the most you can give in a year is six. So to get to 100 takes a while.”

According to Alecia Lipton, public information officer for Hoxworth, of the more than 460,000 donors in the database, Pancioli is in the top quarter of donors. 35 percent have donated more than 100 times, compared to 40 percent who have donated only once. 

"If you just make it a habit, it’s not hard,” says Panicioli. He says he can leave his office, go to Hoxworth to make a donation and be back in his office within an hour. "It’s that easy. There’s nothing to it. It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t take long and we have to do this. It’s like anything else in life—if you recognize it as a worthy thing, you make it a priority.”

To meet demand, Hoxworth has a goal collecting 300 units of blood a day. For more information on donating blood, click here.