Those of you who are Facebook friends may have noticed a few
posts about blood biking in recent weeks and there is of course a reason….
This was something I was heavily involved with back in the
1980’s being a member of the North East Thames Emergency Voluntary Service
(EVS), who supplied an overnight courier service for hospitals in North and
East London carrying samples, whole blood or anything that a
hospital needed moving urgently and couldn’t wait for NHS transport to resume in
the morning.
Even back then it was not a new concept as it had started in
1962 when Margaret Ryerson and her husband formed the Emergency Volunteer
Service (EVS) in Surrey. In 1969 this
was followed by the Freewheelers youth community action group in Stevenage
which initially served hospitals in Stevenage, Luton, Dunstable, Bedford and
Hitchin. These original groups are no longer operating, but they inspired other
groups to provide similar services.
The third group, which still operates today, was the Yeovil
Freewheelers, founded in 1978. And in
1981, SERV in South West London and Surrey and the NE Thames Emergency
Voluntary Service (also known as the EVS) were founded. This latter group was the one I
was a member of and indeed was a committee member for a few years. The EVS
sadly disbanded in 1999 but SERV continues to this day and now operates as a
number of different groups. Other groups followed, and currently there are 34
different groups operating in the UK and 5 in the Irish Republic.
Blood bikes is the informal name for these emergency medical
services, who provide voluntary motorcycle
courier services to hospitals and other healthcare providers, to help with the
transport of urgent blood, tissue and organs. They generally operate overnight at weekends and on bank holidays.
So what’s this got to do with me?
Since my move to Milton Keynes I have cut back on my
previous volunteering activities, I stood down as Chairman of Hertfordshire 4x4
Response at the AGM in March and I ended my eight year stint as a Trustee of
4x4 Response UK in October.
I also resigned my position as a member of the Hertfordshire
Local Access Forum as I no longer live or worked in the County and recently
decided to resign from the National Escort Group GB (NEG GB) as my career as a
motorcycle marshal for cycling events seemed to be a non-starter. I only did
one event in 2015 after they “lost” my email address and the same seems to have
occurred this year as I haven’t been allocated a single event and to be honest
can’t be bothered to chase them anymore.
So as one of life’s inveterate volunteers (you might have
worked that out from the above), I started to look around for something to fulfil
my needs. This also coincided with Grainne's promotion, which means she'll be working shifts again so I'll need something to keep me out of mischief when she has to work weekends. I was out on a ride with Grainne shortly after she got her bike this
summer when we were passed by a liveried blood bike from SERV OBN (Oxon, Berks,
Bucks and Northants). A few days later and I saw another out and about in
Milton Keynes, so started investigating.
The upshot was I applied and was accepted to join SERV OBN
and last weekend started my training, learning the “northern routes” on our
patch. More training will follow in January and then I have an assessment ride
before being allowed to go operational. Just like in the '80s I will only be volunteering at weekends so as not to interfere with work.
A lot hasn’t changed from my experiences back in the eighties
but there is a lot of new stuff too. The most obvious being the use of liveried
fleet bikes rather than using our own vehicles and riders to have an
advanced qualification (so good job I passed my IAM Advanced Test in 2011). The
bikes are equipped with blue lights and sirens but at the current time these
are not used by SERV (it’s a complicated story) but this may change if Sect 19
of the Road Safety Act 2006 is ever enacted, so the bikes are specified with
them.
This week the BBC ran a good article on the Nationwide
Association of Blood Bikers:
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