Freewheelers Emergency Voluntary Service

Nigel Warwick of Severnside Freewheelers.

Nigel Warwick treated us to an extremely informative talk, on the work carried out by the volunteers of the so called ‘blood bikers’.  Their official title is of course as above. However, they sometimes went under the soubriquet of ‘blood bikers’, due to the motif on their tabbards and the fact that at in the early days, it was frequently blood products that they transported.

I believe we learned about  many aspects of their activities.First and foremost, they are all volunteers and are not funded by the Government, the NHS or the Blood transfusion service.The purchase, maintenance and fuelling of their motorcycles, is funded entirely from charitable donations and fundraising activities. In many ways being funded in a similar fashion to the Air Ambulance services.They have to fund all their own personal kit, helmets, mobile phones, foul weather motorcycling gear and so on.

Since the service they provide is basically an ‘out of hours’ service, from 7.0pm to 7.0 am  7/12 and many of them have day jobs, sleepless nights are a frequent occurrence.

Despite this, it is not a shortage of mobile volunteers that is the present problems.  It is the despatchers who sort out the journey allocations, who are harder to recruit.In Nigel’s case, his wife is able to perform this function.

It was also very revealing to learn of items they get asked to transport, generally from one hospital to another.    These can range from DVDs of such things as brain and otherscans, tissue samples, special drugs and medicines, and various fluid samples like blood or plasma.Some of the more bizarre items have included false teeth and even a full size skeleton (see picture of this on their website).

We also learnt about the reactions they sometimes get from a minority of other road users. It was also revealing to learn about the emergency use of ‘blue lights’.   Not required as often as might have thought, since many journeys are carried out in the quieter hours of night time.

All in all an excellent insight into a volunteering activity, motivated in many ways like Rotarians are – giving something back to the community.      Thank you Nigel.

Bryan Webster