yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Meet the 'Blood Bikers' Who Save Lives in the U.K. | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] It would be totally unnatural for you not to think about what has happened to the patients, but the job may well have changed the course of somebody else's.

[Music] The evening starts at about 7:00 p.m. for us. Hello, the controller would ring you and say, "Look, okay, I've got a run for you. It is urgent. It's needed straight away. It can't wait. One box of platelets to go from JR to Raw box in Reading." The reason why we're needed within our region is that the National Health Service nighttime, weekend, and bank holiday Transport Service might be one or two drivers within that area.

There's 26 large hospitals, any of whom could have an issue that you know comes up during the night. Be careful. Bye-bye.

The Nationwide Association of Bud bikes has 25 member groups at the moment, consisting of run and a half, TH000 unpaid volunteers, and in 2014 we responded to just over 39,000 requests from various hospitals in the UK. The items that we move have to be required for the clinical care of an NHS patient, and they have to be [Music] urgent.

We do carry blood, but we also carry rabies serum, spinal fluid samples, surgical instruments, donor milk, CD scans. Without us, the alternatives for the hospitals are to either contact the police to take a frontline ambulance off the road or pay for a taxi. Everything that we do for the NHS is done free of charge. We save the National Health Service hundreds of thousands of pounds.

We like motorbiking, so we're putting that into practice. By filling that gap, those pounds can then be converted into another nurse, another doctor, another piece of equipment. That is really the essence of it for us.

"Hello. Hi, Cameron from surf. Some platelets for Reading, please." I remember on one occasion I took some platelets to Royal Berkshire Hospital, and when I got there, the hospital technician said that he desperately needed this because he had a child that wouldn't stop bleeding, which left quite an impression on me afterwards.

I thought, "Well, maybe I've helped. Maybe just that much." And when you realize that that scenario is replicated across the UK thousands of times a year by people doing exactly what you do in a volunteering role, it's exceptionally humbling.

[Music] Experience.

More Articles

View All
The Moment kurzgesagt Changed Forever
Hey you, so nice of you to join us! We want to tell you about something that changed kurzgesagt forever. Kurzgesagt started out as a small-scale passion project. But creating animated science videos that are free for everyone doesn’t pay the bills – DAMN …
Mapping Patagonia | Best Job Ever
Marty and I set out on an expedition to make the first print and interactive maps of Patagonia National Park. This was a dream project. In Patagonia, we wanted to explore as much of the park as we could. So that meant bushwacking off trails. That meant, y…
What If You Fall into a Black Hole?
Black holes are the most powerful and extreme things in the universe, and they’re wildly weird and complicated. What would happen if you fell inside one, and what are they? [Music] Really, first we need to talk about space and time. Space and time are t…
Worked example: convergent geometric series | Series | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy
Let’s get some practice taking sums of infinite geometric series. So, we have one over here, and just to make sure that we’re dealing with the geometric series, let’s make sure we have a common ratio. So, let’s see: to go from the first term to the seco…
Picking hyperbola equation
So, we’re asked to choose the equation that can represent the hyperbola graphed below. This is the hyperbola graphed in blue, and I encourage you to pause the video and figure out which of these equations are represented by the graph here. All right, let…
How to read 1098 and 1099 tax forms | Taxes and tax forms | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy
Let’s talk about a few very common IRS forms or statements that you are likely to encounter in your life. The first one of these you see right over here is called a 1098, and there are different types of 1098 forms. There’s a 1098, which is to report mort…