Newsline (Winter 2010)

New 65,000 Square Foot Facility Opens

Puget Sound Blood Center has officially opened its new 65,000 square foot facility in Renton, WA. The new facility, next door to its established Renton facility, the Scofield Memorial Laboratory, provided the Blood Center 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 conducted with the Boeing Company focused on improving this process. The new flow has proven successful by shortening testing turnaround time by 1 – 2 hours every day.

The additional room afforded by this move also allows the Blood Center to participate in clinical trials to develop and license the testing equipment of tomorrow. And, importantly, this move provides its component laboratory with the capacity to maximize each donation into multiple components and provide the blood products the community needs today and for years to come.

The Blood Center departments that have moved into the new Renton facility include Material 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.