Improving your experience of donating

A donor giving bloodWe are always working to make your donor experience as smooth as possible, so we are making some changes to our mobile sessions. In the coming months, you can expect to be looked after by the same person through most of your visit. This means they will be asking you the health screening questions, testing your iron levels and taking your donation. By reducing how many times you are “handed over” to different staff members, we hope you’ll find giving blood easier and more relaxing. 

As you can imagine, our staff want to focus on caring for donors before, during and after they give blood. So it would help them enormously if you could make your own hot drink from the machine we are providing. Also, by using our mobile app or visiting blood.co.uk to book your next appointment you’ll be helping too. If you have any trouble with this, you can still call us anytime on 0300 123 23 23 to speak to our helpline staff.

More appointments

We are making more use of pre-booked appointments and moving away from walk-in sessions. This helps us to plan blood collection more efficiently. We know that some donors prefer to walk in, and whilst this will still be possible it may mean having to wait longer. Donors will be offered any vacant appointment slots on the day of the session.

If you have an appointment it will help us if you arrive on time or cancel at least three days in advance so we can run the session smoothly and offer cancelled bookings to other donors. Your help with this is really appreciated, and we hope that more of you will use the self-service online booking system so we are better able to plan blood collections to meet demand from patients and hospitals.

Successful trials

We’ve been testing these changes with seven teams across the country and got the thumbs up from donors. They report that they like having the same carer throughout their visit, although some had concerns about the self-service aspect of making an appointment online or via the App. So we will be giving you more information at session on how to do this.

Introducing these changes to every team will take about 15 months. Taking this time will allow us to get it right, make it safe and tweak it as we go along if we find we have any problems that didn’t show up during the trial.

In this issue of The Donor magazine