Sun employee & fanatical motorcyclist Mike Belch's Weblog Biker Mike's Weblog

After a long week on duty as telephone coordinator for the Freewheelers blood bikes, I was looking forward to a quiet day. I got my wish as we only had a few calls with everyone but the East bike rider home before dark. Here are the details of what we did today:

• East Bike: During the day the rider delivered drugs from the Royal United Hospital (RUH) in Bath to Melksham Hospital and Paulton Hospital. In the evening he made an urgent delivery of a blood sample from the maternity unit at Paulton to the RUH pathology labs. Later in the evening I received a request from the RUH to deliver a letter to a patient's house. For patient confidentiality reasons I cannot discuss what was in the letter, but due to our strict policy on how home deliveries are handled and a concern for the safety of our rider in this particular case, I declined to do the job. The police were asked to deliver the letter instead. NHS money saved: £70. Time on the road: 5h5m

• West Bike: An urgent delivery of patient notes from Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton to the neurosurgeons at Frenchay Hospital. This was followed by a delivery of a blood sample from the privately run NHS treatment centre in Shepton Mallet to the pathology labs at Musgrove Park. NHS money saved: £170. Time on the road: 5h55m.

• North Bike: An emergency delivery of medical instruments from the operating theatre at Southmead Hospital in Bristol to the theatre at Frenchay Hospital. This call originally started as urgent but when our rider got to the hospital he was told to treat it as an emergency because the patient was already "under the knife" at Frenchay. This was followed by an urgent delivery of blood from Southmead Hospital to the Health Protection Agency microbiology laboratory in the centre of Bristol. Later in the evening I was asked to send our bike to Frenchay Hospital to collect and return to Weston-super-Mare a drug pump that was being take to Frenchay in an ambulance with a patient. When I queried the size of the pump the hospital went away and shortly came back to me telling me to cancel the call. Apparently the drug pump was too big to go in the ambulance so there was no way it was going to fit on a bike! NHS money saved: £20. Time on the road: 2 hours.

The scores on the doors for the last night of my week on duty are £260 saved for the NHS and riders on the road for 13 hours. I really was glad for everyone, including myself, that we did not get any late night calls.

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