Blood Bikers: How volunteer motorcyclists are saving lives and thousands of Euro

There are heroes out there after all.

In a lock-up on the Long Mile Road there is a man waiting for a call. The BLOOD lettering on his high-vis vest might be familiar to some drivers, used to seeing them at traffic lights and feeling relief perhaps that it's not a GARDA bike they're seeing. But who are the bikers underneath all the neon and why do they do what they do? Blood Bikes East (BBE) are volunteers; they drive after-hours, through the nights and the weekends, 365 days a year, bringing blood samples, tests, medication and emergency breast milk between hospitals and laboratories-all for free. There is no typical profile for the bikers. They are trumpet players, and bus drivers, civil servants and comedians. Men and women who have combined their passion for bikes and skills on the road to help others If Blood Bikers were not in operation hospitals would be paying taxis an average of €25 for a journey that the volunteers do for free. Since their establishment in 2013, Blood Bikes East, just one of the groups in operation around the country, have made over 6000 call-outs. In monetary terms, that's €150,000 that has been saved or the equivalent of five nurses' yearly salary. Patrick Crawford of BBE says, "the crisis in the health service is financial. We are doing something to alleviate that or at least ease it a small bit." The concept for the Blood Bikes came from the UK.  For 60 years, they have been nimble on the British roads, transporting medication, tests and even small organs. The primary difference between the UK and Ireland is the Irish bikers are not allowed to carry whole blood, the bags that will be used for transfusion. This is a point of contention within the biking community. Patrick Crawford  says, "we would love to carry whole blood. We had a ludicrous situation a while ago, I was at a major Dublin hospital, it needed patient files and whole blood to be transported to another hospital. I could take the files but they had to send for a taxi to take the blood. We are fully Garda vetted, we are trained to transport medication and sensitive items and are advanced trained riders."

I ask what the difference is between a taxi taking the blood porter, which is a special container used to transport blood, and a Blood Bike taking it?

"Absolutely nothing" says Crawford. 

"I waited to see what happened to the blood and a guy came out with one of the blood porters, put it in the back of his car and drove off. It wasn't even a taxi, it was a hackney. The only difference between a Blood Bike taking it and a taxi taking it is we are faster, much faster."

For an out of hours call-out to transport whole blood, hospitals are paying upwards of €50 to private taxis and couriers. Patrick Crawford maintains that this is a service the BBE are fully equipped to deal with and to provide for free. 

Figures released in June showed that the HSE is paying €70k a day to taxis -€25m a year- causing  people to question the efficiency of the current system.

Crawford acknowledges that while most of this expenditure is for patients getting to and from the hospital, a 'sizeable' proportion of it is money unnecessarily spent on taxis transporting whole blood as an out-of-hours service.

To better understand what they do and why they do it, I went out with the BBE one Thursday evening, riding pillion on the back of a motorcycle.

It was 7pm when Paul, who works for Dublin Bus, got his first call of the evening.

Within 30 seconds we were on the bikes and en route to St.Michael's Hospital in Dun Laoghaire via the M50. There, we picked up blood samples and brought them for testing to the laboratory in St. Vincent's, Dublin 4.

This was a short hop for BBE as we could have been called to any of the 22 Dublin hospitals that they works with, or we could have been called to a link-up with another blood bike group from anywhere in the country.

All of the blood bike volunteers have their own reasons for volunteering. The morning after Graham Hastings' first shift with BBE he came downstairs to find a thunderbird figure on his helmet; his son had put it there.

The comedian P.J. Gallagher says he volunteered because, "honestly it's a good feeling. You feel like you are doing something helpful and it does make a difference. I think any kind of volunteering feels like that though but if I'm really honest, the best part is just riding a bike, alone, at mad hours and enjoying it."

P.J. remembers his first shift vividly.

"The first time that phone rings for your first run it scares the life out of you. It's actually a great buzz, no matter what time of the night or morning it happens. Once that first one is done the rest is easy and just being careful."

Riding with the BBE was every bit as cool as P.J made it out to be. It felt badass doing something so altruistically good while wearing leather. The Blood Bikers spotted a problem and saw a way that they could really help and effect a difference in their community. They are a grassroots voluntary organisation who successfully run themselves like a business. They are always looking for bikers or people who want to get involved and their contact is on their website.