Bad Weather Hits Motorbike Medical Charity

The seemingly endless wet weather up to the end of 2012 did more than damage houses, roads and businesses. It had a serious impact on a specialist medical charity which provides urgent and emergency deliveries of blood, organs and other medical supplies to NHS hospitals via highly-trained advanced motorcyclists.

The “blood bike” service, run entirely by volunteers, saw its usual fund-raising efforts badly hit in the run-up to Christmas. The chairman, Dan Lavery, who founded the group, said that really bad weather had drastically reduced the amounts of money collected by the charity in its regular fund-raising activities, because so few people had ventured out of doors. In some cases, fund-raising simply had to be cancelled because the weather was so atrocious.

The charity’s reserves were hit to such an extent that the riders were paying for fuel out of their own pockets to deliver urgently needed medical supplies, as well as giving their time and expert motorcycling skills for free.

Since Christmas, the situation has improved, partly because of a donation of £500 from a local benefactor, but it illustrates how even the most worthy of causes can be vulnerable in these difficult financial times.

Read more about the bloodbikes here:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-19084664