At sixty-five years old, the Blood Center has seen significant growth in not only its service area and donor base, but in the number of tests that need to be performed on every blood donation to ensure a safe blood supply. This year, that growth led us to the completion and opening of our new Renton West building, where we now have room to accommodate the increased testing and future growth in testing and component production as well.

The new facility, next door to our established Renton facility, gave us the opportunity to design a building with a more streamlined flow for many areas – In particular, for incoming donations and associated testing. The design of this new flow came to fruition following a 2007 LEAN workshop we conducted with the Boeing Company focused on improving this process. The new flow and new technologies have proven successful by shortening testing turnaround time by 1 – 2 hours every day.

In addition to efficiencies gained in testing our own blood donations, the new facility also allows us to continue to provide comprehensive testing for our external testing clients. And as new tests are added for blood supply safety, we are able to bring in new, advanced instrumentation to conduct those tests. The additional room also allows us to participate in clinical trials for development of tomorrow’s testing equipment.

Importantly, this move provides our component laboratory with the capacity to maximize each donation into multiple components and provide the blood components our community needs today and for years to come. As the Northwest continues to grow, this is a crucial expansion for us.

The Blood Center departments that have moved into Renton West include Materials Management, Donor Testing, Inventory Production, Inventory Management, and Blood Collection Services Information Specialists who perform donor record review. The adjacency of each of these departments connects the stream of activities that were once separated in multiple buildings and brings a new found efficiency to the entire organization.

As one of the biggest undertakings the Blood Center completed in 2009, we are naturally very proud of Renton West. Because of this expansion we can say with confidence that tomorrow and well into the future we will, without question, be able to meet the needs of our community.