District of Berchtesgadener Land/Salzburg: Blood donation will take place in future in cooperation with the Austrian Red Cross (ÖRK)
The 68-year-old cross-border cooperation between Bavaria and Salzburg will be expanded across the district from 2022.
The message in full:
District of Berchtesgadener Land/Salzburg – The Salzburg blood donation service of the Austrian Red Cross (ÖRK) will take care of all blood donation appointments in the Berchtesgadener Land from 2022 together with the volunteers of the local standby teams of the Bavarian Red Cross (BRK). “We are thus expanding a very successful cross-border cooperation that has been practiced exclusively in the inner district with appointments in the Berchtesgaden market for 68 years!” thanks for the good decades of cooperation. The reason for the change is that the Red Cross can carry out the appointments much more efficiently than from Munich due to the very short travel distances of the Salzburg teams and that the blood donated at the Salzburg location is also available to the district citizens again if they are in Salzburg clinics are treated or in an emergency, a canned product from Salzburg is needed quickly.
BRK district manager Tobias Kurz, Anton Holzer, the head of the Salzburg blood donation service and BSD manager Georg Götz agree that it makes no difference to the blood donors who carries out the blood donation on site. “Rather, the focus is on the need-based and documented patient supply of donor blood being permanently guaranteed by the above-average willingness of the population in the district to donate blood,” emphasizes Götz. The physical proximity offers many advantages in practical cooperation, but also in terms of logistics; The extended cooperation also results in advantages for the many blood-donating cross-border commuters in the district. The blood donation dates will continue to be supported by the volunteers of the well-known BRK readiness. “In the future, long-standing blood donors will only be honored locally without central events, whereby the blood donations previously made at the BRK blood donation service will of course be taken into account,” explains Kurz.
From the new year, blood donation appointments in Anger, Bad Reichenhall, Berchtesgaden, Freilassing, Laufen (in future together with Oberndorf), Piding and Teisendorf will be offered by the ÖRK. “We asked the Bavarian blood donors to first find out about their next blood donation appointment online or in the daily newspaper. After the first edition of the WCC, you will then automatically receive an invitation to the following dates, as has been the case with the BRK,” explains Holzer. The dates can be found online at https://www.gibdeinbestes.at/termine? or www.brk-bgl.de.
For more than 68 years now, the borderless blood donation service in Berchtesgaden has proven its worth. A few weeks before the blood donation service was founded in Regensburg, it was the first voluntary blood donation service in Bavaria and the only one to be operated across the borders of two national Red Crosses -Associations operated jointly. Since September 9, 1953 under the leadership of the BRK district column leader Toni Leitner and the doctor Dr. Hans Wolfgang Roth the first 64 blood samples were taken in the Berchtesgaden hospital, the ÖRK blood donation service successfully and reliably looks after the inner district in the Berchtesgadener Land with an above-average willingness to donate.
Serious traffic accident with seven dead & 18 injured in Locksteinstrasse
When Leitner and Roth published the concept for founding the Berchtesgaden blood donation service in the Berchtesgadener Anzeiger on September 4, 1953, a serious traffic accident occurred on the same day in Locksteinstraße, in which a total of seven people died and 18 were injured, some of them seriously. The blood that was urgently needed at that time came from Salzburg, which underscored the need for cross-border cooperation at first hand. The blood banks on German soil would have been in Munich and Regensburg and at that time were still severely limited in terms of their capacities. However, complicated regulations on foreign exchange control made it very difficult to pay for the canned goods that were delivered, and the Salzburg Blood Center also only has a limited number of canned goods. So it made sense to serve the Salzburg blood center directly with blood donations again.
For more than 68 years now, blood from Berchtesgaden has been flowing to the Salzburg blood center to be available there in further treated form for emergencies on both sides of the Salzburg-Bavarian border. “In the Berchtesgadener-Salzburg area, a custom has survived for so long that is unique worldwide. A piece of EUREGIO, exemplified long before the word even existed!” says Edi Schmid, who has been coordinating the voluntary blood donation helpers of the BRK on-call services in the district for two years.
Eight blood donation dates in Berchtesgadener Land have already been set for the first quarter; they always take place from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.:
- On Thursday and Friday, February 17 and February 18 in the Sankt Zeno parish hall, Salzburger Straße 29a (across the courtyard next to Caritas), 83435 Bad Reichenhall
- On Wednesday, February 23rd in the Mitterfelden parish hall, Ludwig-Thoma-Straße 2, 83404 Ainring
- On Thursday February 24th at Aufhamer Schule, Angerstraße 30, 83454 Anger
- On Tuesday, March 8th, in the parish hall of the Nativity of Mary, Thomasstrasse 9, 83451 Piding
- On Tuesday March 15th at the elementary school, Kohlhaasstraße 4, 83410 Laufen an der Salzach
- On Tuesday, March 22nd at Badylon, Aumühlweg 9, 83395 Freilassing
- On Tuesday, March 29th at the elementary and middle school, Poststrasse 11 (access via Steinwenderstrasse), 83317 Teisendorf
Press release Bavarian Red Cross, KdöR – district association Berchtesgadener Land