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17 February 2021 | Story Andre Damons | Photo Pixabay
Two final-year MBChB students show how it is done when they donated blood earlier this year.

Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB) staff and students in the Faculty of Health Sciences have challenged other departments in the faculty as well as other faculties and departments at the University of the Free State (UFS) to see whose staff and students will donate the most blood!

Mrs Angela Vorster, UFS Clinical Psychologist, says the South African National Blood Services (SANBS) has been appealing for increased blood donations since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year. In order to provide support, the School of Clinical Medicine at the UFS held a virtual blood donation challenge in 2020, to encourage students to participate in altruistic behaviour and to enable the pre-clinical platform year groups to also feel like they are providing essential medical assistance.

“This was hugely successful and consequently we decided to include a blood donation challenge in our annual Mental Health Awareness programme. The benefits of donating blood are not only of a physiological nature (e.g. it assists in reducing iron levels and helps to control high blood pressure etc.) but means you are giving something of yourself. It will definitely save at least one life, perhaps more, and is incredibly beneficial in enhancing feelings of self-worth and personal meaning,” says Vorster.

The Faculty of Health Sciences invited the SANBS to UFS this week to provide all students and staff with the opportunity to donate blood at their place of work and study. So Have a Heart and take a few minutes to relax with a cookie and cool drink while your heart does the work of blood donation for you.

Details are as follows:

When: 18 and 19 February

Where: Francois Retief Foyer UFS

Time: 07:00-14:30

News Archive

Academic appointed as Visiting Professor in the USA
2009-02-03

 

The Director of Research Development and Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development at the University of the Free State (UFS), Prof. Frans Swanepoel (pictured), has been appointed as Visiting Professor at Cornell University, New York, USA. He has just completed a five-month appointment as a Fulbright Professor at Cornell University. He and Cornell colleagues are collaborating on an initiative to revise agricultural education curricula in Africa, supported by the WK Kellogg and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations. They are also working on a book, The Role of Livestock in Developing Communities: Enhancing Multifunctionality, to be published in June this year. He has also investigated best practice and latest developments in research management and innovation at a number of US universities and delivered the main paper by invitation at a workshop on Research Management at Emerging Institutions at the Society for Research Administrators’ Annual Conference in Washington DC in October last year. Cornell is the only Ivy League University in the USA with a College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Photo: Supplied

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