Message from the Chair of the Héma-Québec Foundation

Héma-Québec plays an essential role in our lives. Day after day, 2,000 times per year throughout Québec, it collects your donations of life. You make your donations 1,000 times a day. The gift of blood is the most beautiful gift anyone can offer someone because it is the gift of life. Obviously, no technology can replace this life-giving donation. However, several of us cannot give blood as often as we would like, either because we don’t have time or because we simply cannot give blood. But there are other ways of helping. Making a donation to the Foundation is another way to play our part in ensuring the supply of blood products.

For this reason, and for many more, I have proudly agreed to get involved in this cause, by joining the Héma-Québec Foundation and sitting on its Board of Directors, which I have chaired since May 2005.

But why create a Foundation? As an organization, Héma-Québec already enjoys an international reputation for the quality and efficiency with which it provides blood products and substitutes, human tissue and cord blood for Quebecers, under very safe conditions. But the Foundation's role is specifically to provide financial support for this remarkable work so that Héma-Québec can remain at the leading edge of global knowledge and maintain the highest standards when providing this service to the public. The Foundation has a mandate to help Héma-Québec DO MORE, DO IT BETTER and DO IT FASTER with innovative projects that benefit everyone. Projects such as the GLOBULE Mobile Blood Donation Unit and the Chair in Transfusion Medicine at the Université de Montréal are excellent examples of this.

The Héma-Québec Foundation has made enormous progress since it was founded, thanks to its generous donors and volunteers as well as the staff of both Héma-Québec and the Foundation who work to develop the organization. The Foundation is counting on your support and generosity to do more and better, since the needs are constantly increasing.

Monique Lefebvre
Chair of the Héma-Québec Foundation