Could your next journey save a life? Ours could!
Derbyshire Blood Bikes is a small and fairly new charity, providing a free medical courier service for the local NHS hospitals. Their aim is to support the NHS and save them money by transporting urgent and important blood, samples, medication or equipment, free of charge to wherever it needs to go.
They started in 2012 with a small number of ageing Honda motorcycles. Thanks to funding from a number of charitable sources, including Derbyshire Freemasons, they’ve been able to add three BMW motorcycles and a Citroen Car to their fleet over the last 18 months.
In 2017, they made almost 900 journeys covering almost 60,000 miles, saving the NHS around an estimated £55,000. That’s money the NHS didn’t have to spend on commercial courier services and represents many patients who had the best treatments at the earliest time possible. 2018 has been even busier, with well over 1,000 journeys made for the NHS by their volunteers.
The group of around 40 volunteers have to raise in excess of £18,500 every year just to operate. Much of that comes from donations at events and presentations made by the volunteers. All this has allowed the group to further develop their service to the NHS to meet many of their development aims, well ahead of their most optimistic hopes.
