Historic Omaha

In 1859, Henry Dunant crossed the
battlefield at Solferino, Italy and was moved by
the number of wounded and dying soldiers.
Dunant gathered the local townspeople
together to feed, comfort and tend to the
injuries of the wounded. And so the idea of the
International Red Cross was born.
The idea came to America through Clara
Barton who established the American
Association of the Red Cross in Washington
D.C., on May 21, 1881. The Omaha Chapter of
the American Red Cross opened on April 10,
1917. In 1981 the Chapter was renamed the
Heartland Chapter when the Douglas and Sarpy
County chapters merged. The Heartland
Chapter currently serves eighty thousand
people annually with disaster services and
lifesaving training.
On February 18, 1948, the new American
Red Cross Blood Center at Twenty-fifth and
Farnam opened its doors. The organization
collected blood from volunteer donors to
provide to patients in area hospitals. Dr. Russell
Best, founder of the blood program, had
envisioned a community blood program while
serving in military hospitals during World War
II. “There” he said, “blood was readily available
for the wounded. Why should it not be
available for all people in time of peace?”
During its first year of operations, the blood
program collected 8,047 units of lifesaving
blood. Today, more than five decades later, the
program now called Midwest Region Blood
Services collects blood in ninety-two counties
in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Colorado. This
blood is then distributed to eighty-six hospitals
throughout the region. The program, with an
annual operating budget in excess of twenty
million dollars, employs more than 375 staff at
locations in Omaha, North Platte, and Grand
Island, Nebraska.
In addition to providing much needed blood
to regional hospitals, Midwest Region Blood
Services also provides specialized services such
as peripheral stem cell collections, plasma
exchanges, reference laboratory facilities for
tough cross matching problems, and many
other critical services.
In 1993, as part of a nationwide
transformation of the American Red Cross,
Blood Services was formally separated from
Chapter Services. The two organizations
continue to work closely with one another,
providing humanitarian and medical aid to
victims of war and disaster in our region and
throughout the world.
Today, the American Red Cross is the largest
humanitarian organization in the United States
and the nation’s largest collector, processor,
tester and distributor of blood, supplying
approximately 3,000 hospitals through the
generous donation of nearly 20,000 people daily.
The Red Cross also provides nearly a quarter of
the nation’s human tissue for transplantation and
approximately fifteen percent of the nation’s
supply of therapeutic derivatives of human blood
plasma, as well as operating the largest, most
advanced research laboratory in the world.
AMERICAN
RED CROSS
QUALITY OF LIFE
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