The main purpose of the Stanford Blood Center (SBC) donor centers is to serve the community by providing a fixed community‐based location for donors to donate blood products that are needed to support the increasingly large and complex transfusion needs of Stanford Health Care and Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, and to perform research and teaching. SBC needed to consolidate its program by housing both administrative and donor functions at a new location.

The new administrative space includes three call centers for tele-recruiting, special donations, and field recruiting, conference room, offices, and back-of-house space for storage. The donor space includes 14 blood draw stations with 6 history/vitals stations. The project also included a new roof-mounted generator and minor site accessibility upgrades.

As an academic blood center, the early design phases focused on crafting a donor experience plan that would engage the older dedicated donor population while also engaging younger and new donors. The interior design of the donation center blends with the branding and donor education/donor engagement programs to provide opportunities for donor education throughout the donation process. Opportunities for social media engagement were designed in to the lobby space. The canteen, where donors recover, includes a variety of community engagement programs to encourage donors to return for future donations.

The call centers were carefully integrated with the furniture systems, call technology, and acoustical engineering to ensure a high-quality call environment. Additionally, despite limitation of the existing building, all spaces within the administrative center were provided with access to natural daylight to promote higher job satisfaction and improved productivity.

Extensive process mapping and flow mapping was done to develop a highly efficient plan for donors and staff, including iPad registration and integrated donor flow signaling system to minimize wait times for donors.

Photography: John Sutton Photography