The eastern province blood transfusion service: A case study

Abstract

An analysis was made of the location of the nine blood banks in the Eastern Province Blood Transfusion Service. The banks were considered as the vertices of an undirected graph. The cost of collecting and distributing blood was assumed to be proportional to the distances between vertices, and to the population of each district. The 9-median of the graph was calculated and the corresponding cost compared with the cost of the actual configuration, which turned out to be about 3% higher.