Blood bikers

A cracking example of local initiative with positive implications for rural health, this article tells us:

Andy Stacey has spent his morning collecting breast milk. It’s been an average Tuesday for the retired 51-year-old; knocking on the doors of nursing women who donate their milk and packing bottles of it on to his motorbike so he can ferry it all to a milk bank at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, where it will be given to sick or premature babies. Back in the living room of his cottage in Dorney, near Windsor, he awaits orders for his evening shift. At 7.02pm, his phone buzzes. He murmurs in agreement to the voice on the other end – the controller on duty – and takes a last gulp of tea. Minutes later, having negotiated his way past cows crossing village lanes, he is hurtling down the M40 to make his second trip of the day, transporting platelets to the hospital.

Stacey is a blood biker – one of a team of almost 2,700 volunteers in the UK who provide a rapid response medical courier service to the NHS. He first signed up at a car show and says: “It married up my passion for motorcycles and enabled me to give something back. It’s just something I felt I should do. I’ve not regretted it, it’s been great fun.”

As well as blood products and human milk, blood bikers carry test samples for analysis, medication and medical instruments. Small groups of bikers began operating in a few areas in the south of England in the early 1960s, and in 2016, they had their busiest year ever, completing a record-breaking 56,134 job runs, for over 230 NHS hospitals and laboratories across the UK.

Peter Robertson, chair of the National Association of Blood Bikes (Nabb), says this is mainly down to the movement expanding, which was one of the Nabb’s main goals when it was founded as an umbrella organisation in 2008. “Back then, coverage across the country was very limited. Now we’ve got to the stage where almost the whole of the UK is covered.” While there aren’t exact figures for how much blood bikes save the health service, the Nabb estimates savings last year were around £1.4m and that it costs the NHS £25 a go, on average, to use a private courier service.