Our beginnings go back more than 90 years, and they started with blood.

The Australian Red Cross was one of the first in the world to establish a committee to manage Australia’s first major Blood Transfusion Service, with Dr Lucy Bryce as Director

Advancements in refrigeration technology meant we could now store blood outside of the body for days. No longer needing to collect blood transfusions on demand during an operation, we could bank blood in advance

The 1940s brought a number of exciting discoveries for plasma, it was also a decade of unprecedented demand for blood, and the beginning of mobile blood banking

It was an exciting time in the medical and research space, as we collected donations that made ground-breaking surgeries and research possible

Our leading involvement in research saw the establishment of the first tissue typing laboratory, life changing developments in haemolytic disease prevention and our ground-breaking Anti-D Program

With a shift from our historical wartime narrative, the dawn of the technical age and a more proactive approach to marketing and donor recruitment, we began to forge our new identity

Australia recorded its first case of AIDS in 1983, with misinformation changing the nature of blood banking forever

An exciting new era was born in 1996 as we became a national service

Working with health providers and clinicians, we implemented a national approach to help them manage the use of the blood products we collected more efficiently

We continue to look for ways to make a greater contribution to Australian healthcare