Brendan M.
1/5
I have been donating to this center for a little over two years - according to the Grifols app, I have donated at least 194 times. Grifols own room-temperature-IQ policies lost this donor.
1. For 194 donations I passed their blood protein screening test and was told my blood protein was great, yet for the third time now I will be deferred multiple weeks because that test was wholly inaccurate and meaningless and my donation itself had protein too low - we are not talking a little inaccurate either, the last deferral there was a 30% difference between the screening test and actual protein - instead of missing one donation for me to get my protein up, Grifols misses 2-3 weeks worth. Very brilliant stuff, big brains at work here. Doesn't seem like you want plasma!
2. Grifols lowered payouts by roughly 40% for new and returning donors since 2021 even as inflation skyrocketed. Again, doesn't seem like you want plasma!
3. After reducing these payouts, Grifols institutes a new system where some donors are going from 700-800mL to 900+ mL donations. They do not get more compensation for this. I have heard exactly zero positive comments about this change from donors. Doesn't seem like you want plasma.
4. In addition to the protein screening being so inaccurate they are just providing a made up number, expect to semi routinely be turned away for a heart rate reading you can't replicate anywhere else - it will almost always add 10-20bpm to whatever your actual heart rate is, and if they read 100+ they send you away. Last week while waiting for my appointment, 5 different donors in a row somehow had heart rates over 100bpm after waiting 5-20 minutes sitting in a chair. Instead of considering the unlikeliness of that situation and how often it somehow only miraculously occurs there, they just turn off their brains and point at the clearly miscalibrated machine like it is a tiny plastic God. Doesn't seem like "we want more plasma" behavior.
5. A little while after instituting an appointment system that finally made it so you werent spending 2+ hours for a 50 minute donation, Grifols decided to increase the amount of donors it took for each appointment slot to an amount that is too much for their staffing numbers, so now you will once again be spending over 2 hours to make a 50 minute donation. Instead of this bringing in new donors (why would it? Why would "waiting longer" make anyone want to suddenly donate? How are these policies so impossibly stupid?) it just meant existing donors selected slots they thought were open and got stuck paying for the change we as donors were not informed of.
You can follow every rule and jump through every hurdle they ask, Grifols will go out of its way to find a way to turn donors away, even going so far as to do things like the protein screenings where it is directly and wholly their fault the deferral happened. Donors can't win, and I'll be recommending anyone and everyone in the area finds literally any alternative to ever giving a drop of plasma to Grifols.
