Donor care

You won’t find a higher purpose than this.

There are thousands of people who donate their blood, organs, tissues or stem cells to help us save and improve lives, and thousands more who work in our donor care teams to help those donations safely reach the people who need them most.

You might look after our blood donors and guide them through the donation process, or you might provide vital support to make organ transplants possible. Whatever your role, it’s your chance to make a difference to thousands of lives, across communities and families, relatives and friends.

Healthcare assistants

Our healthcare assistants play a role you won’t find anywhere else – looking after our donors when they visit us to donate blood, blood products or plasma.

They’re at the centre of donor care, supporting our donors through every step of the process. This includes:

assessing their ability to donate
taking their blood donations
looking after their wellbeing while they’re with us

It's highly rewarding and important work as part of an amazing team.

What do you need to join as a healthcare assistant?

You don’t need any specific healthcare qualifications to join us, just experience of working with people and a passion for delivering great customer service.

But you will need to be comfortable looking at blood and handling blood bags and needles. As part of your role, you’ll be trained in venepuncture, which is inserting a needle in a donor's arm to take blood.

Where do healthcare assistants work?

Healthcare assistants can be based either in fixed blood and plasma donor centres across the country, or as part of mobile blood donation teams who travel to different locations each day.

After training, the mobile teams also drive our vans and minibuses, as well as loading, unloading and assembling mobile donation session equipment.

Whichever type of team you join, you will be given full training in your first few weeks to prepare you to carry out your role confidently and safely.

Donor care specialisms

Blood donation

As part of one of our blood donation teams, you’ll help collect more than a million units of blood every year and make sure that each donor has the best experience.

There are a wide range of roles in our blood donation team, whether that’s taking the donations or providing behind the scenes support. In each of these roles, you’ll play a part in our life-changing work.

Plasma for medicines

A new type of donation helping to save thousands of lives a year in England, plasma donations can help people build antibodies, heal burns, protect pregnancies and help a baby’s heart carry on beating.

That’s what makes plasma for medicines an incredibly rewarding place to work.

Organ and tissue donation and transplantation

Our organ and tissue donation and transplantation teams help make thousands of transplants happen by matching donors with those waiting for a transplant.

But we know we can do even more. When you join this team, you’ll help us get transplants for the thousands of people on the UK waiting list.

"I find the role rewarding and I get a lot of job satisfaction. I would recommend NHSBT to anyone. It is ideal if you enjoy helping people."

Paul, Donor Care Supervisor

Find out more about roles in donor care

As well as our healthcare assistants, we have a range of other roles that support donations.

Nursing

Whether you join as a blood donation nurse or as a specialist in organ or tissue donation, you’ll support our patients, donors and their families throughout the process and make a difference to their experience.

Support office

We have a number of behind the scenes roles that keep the donations process running, whether that’s welcoming donors, looking after donor records or maintaining important data for our donation sessions.

Donor care vacancies

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