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

[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.