A lifesaving North East charity needs help from…

A lifesaving North East charity needs help from volunteers to transport blood on motorbikes

The team behind a life-saving North East charity is always in need of volunteers who can transport blood around our region, at speed.

The Northumbria Blood Bikes charity - which transports vital blood supplies between North East hospitals during evenings and weekends - weathered the storm of the Covid-19 pandemic. But with some volunteers stepping back and fuel prices rising, the charity is always searching for new riders and ways to find the £80,000 a year needed to operate.

NBB, which won the Queen's Award for Voluntary Service in 2017, also transports blood to the Great North Air Ambulance on a daily basis. The charity was founded in 2012, became operational in 2014 and is part of the Nationwide Association of Blood Bikes.

During Covid-19, the need for NBB rose, with the charity stepping in to help support the delivery of vital Covid-19 supplies during the worst of the pandemic. But riders and drivers - cars are used to transport blood when the temperature falls below three degrees celsius - need to have advanced driving qualifications and be experienced on the roads, so they can be in short supply.

Trustee Kirsty Lawrence told ChronicleLive: "During Covid, our workload actually increased quite a lot. We started transporting Covid samples which made us even busier - but we also experienced the difficulty of not being able to get volunteers

"We are still trying to catch up on that with new volunteers - that's been the real difficulty for us."

Not everyone is able to volunteer as a rider - with experience on motorbikes required along with advanced qualifications and a significant time commitment.

The charity needs to raise around £80,000 a year to operate, and high fuel costs exacerbated over 2022 have made this all the more vital. Kirsty added: "Something that's been very difficult for us has been the cost of fuel. Our fuel bill is around £5,000 a month now. That's our biggest outlay by far."

Kirsty explained that many of NBB's volunteers are retired, and can come from all walks of life. "We are all volunteers. Nobody within the charity is paid," she said.

"Everyone donates their time - including myself as trustee. Quite a lot of our volunteers are retired though we also have a lot of people who work shifts, for example. And what's been really good for us has been companies which may have started to work a four-day week."

In the run-up to Christmas, NBB always carries out a special Santa run delivering presents to children in need on hospital wards around the region. Trips to see children at eight wards took place this year, concluding in Newcastle at the Freeman Hospital - where little Beatrix Adamson-Archbold on the children's heart unit was among those delighted to see the bikes arrive.

Rather than blood or medical supplies, this time the bikes were laden with presents supplied by supportive local organisations such as the Reece Foundation, Toy Town Washington. Staff at DFS and Nissan also helped collect the gifts for delivery.

Now, looking forward to 2023, Kirsty said the more people able to volunteer their time - if not as riders, as fundraisers or just people generally able to help support the charity - the better. She said: "We've grown so much - it's unbelievable. This year is our tenth anniversary and in 18 months it will be ten years since our first operational job.

"We are still in that sense a new charity but we have done over 100,000 deliveries."

To find out more about NBB, visit www.northumbriabloodbikes.org.uk/

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