30 October 2017
SpanSet assist with securing precious cargo for the volunteers of North West Blood Bikes Lancs and Lakes
NORTH WEST BLOOK BIKES - dispatch motorcycles to collect and deliver urgently needed supplies such as whole blood, platelets, samples for analysis, medication, patient notes, small medical instruments, donor breast milk or whatever needs to moved quickly between hospitals.
As a completely voluntary organisation, they don’t charge the hospitals for this service. The riders do this simply to help the NHS, because they have either had help personally or with their own families. They never know what they are carrying between hospitals and very rarely hear if they have contributed to saving a life or improving a patient's treatment, which is their motivation for what they do.
Over the last few months, SpanSet have been working on providing straps for their bikes to keep their precious cargos secure. The volunteers use their own bikes (as well as the special liveried blood bikes) so the design for these straps needed to take this into consideration.
We are delighted to say that in October the straps were ready and the guys came over to collect them. Steve Dunstan wrote to us afterwards to explain how much donations mean to them and give us an idea on how much these wonderful vounteers achieve -
"It was a pleasure to meet with you and your colleagues yesterday and to take delivery of the straps.
On behalf of North West Blood Bikes Lancs and Lakes I would like to thank you for your recent kind donation of the blood box straps.
Our volunteers provide an out of hours motorcycle delivery service which supports the NHS. Providing this transport costs money and many of our riders pay their own fuel bills and use their own bikes. We also provide an emergency service with specially equipped liveried motorcycles and the cost of running these is quite expensive, so donations such as yours are very welcome.
To date we have handled over 41,000 call outs since we started in 2012 and the numbers are ever increasing. We are currently completing around 1200 calls a month saving the local hospitals a considerable amount as well as directly helping to save lives.
Without help from organisations like yours we would not be able to do it.
Conservative estimates based on standard taxi fare show that we have saved the local NHS in Lancashire and South Lakes several millions of pounds so far and included runs as far away as Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Cardiff Abingdon, Charing Cross & Great Ormond Street."
