Inside The Donor Room: Where Blood Collection Research and Donor Experience Come Together
Each day an estimated 29,000 units of red blood cells are needed to treat people for everything from surgery to trauma to cancer to childbirth, according to the American Red Cross.1 That equates to someone needing blood or platelets every two seconds. There’s no substitute for blood’s life-saving components. It is a medicine with no replacement, yet only about three percent of age-eligible people donate blood each year.2
With so much at stake, it’s vital that blood donors come forward and donate regularly. Fortunately, there’s a group of people who have made it their focus to continuously improve the devices that make blood collection possible, ensuring blood donation is a comfortable, positive experience for the donor and safe and effective for patients.
Committed to Continuous Improvement
The Donor Room at Fresenius Kabi has supported blood collection research and product development for more than 30 years. The dedicated professionals who work there have first-hand experience of how blood donation saves lives.
Manager Danielle Badgley worked as an acute dialysis nurse in a hospital setting caring for patients who had multiple co-morbidities before she joined Fresenius Kabi. “I’d see patients come in who were not responsive in the intensive care unit,” she said. She helped treat patients with kidney disease through dialysis therapies and apheresis procedures, where harmful substances were removed from their blood. Using advanced medical devices to collect blood and transfuse it back into the patient without the harmful toxins, she observed many patients make a recovery.
The positive impact on the patients – like seeing them recover and go home – made a lasting impression on Danielle. When she had an opportunity to join Fresenius Kabi working in The Donor Room, she took it.
“Once I read the job description, I knew it was something exciting I wanted to be part of,” Danielle said. That was 13 years ago.
Long tenures are common in The Donor Room. Jeanne Cunningham has worked there for 32 years. Prior to supporting medical device clinical trials, she worked as a nurse in hospital, outpatient, and extended care settings.
“It was a surprise opportunity that I never regretted,” she said about her three decades of working in The Donor Room. She enjoys being part of a team of professionals devoted to improving transfusion medicine and the positive response of blood donors to this important research.
“It was a great next step in my desire to make a difference in the lives of patients,” she said.
Collaboration from Concept to Launch
Innovation and improved methods of collecting blood can only happen thanks to research. Donors who give blood at The Donor Room understand their blood will be used for the purpose of designing, testing, and improving blood collection devices. Every donor meets certain criteria, and they receive compensation.
Blood collected in The Donor Room is used to rigorously test new medical devices, beginning with feasibility studies all the way through product launch. Danielle and her team work with other Fresenius Kabi employees across the company in engineering, clinical operations, physiology, quality, and regulatory approval to design, research, test, and evaluate new devices and technologies that support blood collection. They provide feedback on new products from the perspective of donors as well as from a blood collector’s perspective.
The staff in The Donor Room are trained by engineers on how to use the new equipment as it is tested. When a product is ready for a clinical trial, Danielle’s team assists with protocol development and conducts investigations with meaningful outcomes, so nurses, phlebotomists, donors and patients across the world have the benefit of their experience.
Donors have the benefit of seeing how their donation contributes to research. Some are involved from the very beginning of testing product feasibility all the way through to product launch. Through posters of successful product launches displayed in The Donor Room, the staff make sure donors understand the important role they play in the continuous improvement of blood collection devices.
National Blood Collectors Week: Honoring Staff and Donors of The Donor Room
Blood donation is essential to being Committed to Life. Giving blood requires a donor’s commitment, and blood collectors honor that commitment by ensuring donors have a good experience, feel appreciated, and understand how blood donation saves lives.
In honor of National Blood Collectors Week, September 7–14, 2025, Fresenius Kabi would like to thank the dedicated staff and donors of The Donor Room for their vital work supporting the development of devices and protocols that allow continuous improvement in blood collection. We honor and celebrate them for supporting a life-saving blood supply for patient care.
1,2 https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/how-to-donate/how-blood-donations-help/blood-needs-blood-supply.html