Focus on Windows Apps for Health: NHSGiveBlood gives donors control

This post is part of an occasional series about health-focused apps for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone. If you’ve developed a health or wellness app on a Windows platform and you’d like to be considered for this series, leave a link to your app in the comments.

Giving blood is one of the easiest and most important ways you can help someone else receive life-saving care. Donating blood may not cost you anything, but it can mean everything to someone who needs a transfusion. The NHS collects about 1.9 million blood donations each year, but only about 4% of UK adults give blood, so there’s a constant need to attract new donations. To promote giving blood, the NHS needs a people-centric, mobile-ready approach to donor services.

One of the ways the NHS is encouraging blood donations is by making it easy for donors to book and manage appointments on a self-serve basis on their Windows Phone using the NHSGiveBlood app. Donors in England and North Wales can now use the app to register, look up nearby venues and session times, book an appointment or modify existing bookings. The app makes it easy to edit personal details and see a timeline of their donation history. Donors can also use the app to tell their Facebook friends about their decision to donate – and maybe even inspire their friends to do the same.

By offering donation bookings on a mobile-ready, self-serve basis the NHS is making blood donation as simple as possible. When a single donation can help as many as three people, that’s a very good thing indeed.

Check out the NHSGiveBlood app now for Windows Phone.