Friday February 16, 2007

Blood Bike Calls Thursday

The theme of tonight's calls for the Freewheelers blood bikes was head injuries. Also, yesterday I said it would be tempting fate to say I wished our riders could have a night at home in bed. I should have kept my mouth shut!

Our West bike rider had an evening at home with no calls, but the other two were kept busy:

• North Bike: A very urgent delivery of patient notes from Frenchay Hopsital to the cardiac care unit at Southmead Hospital in Bristol. This was followed by an urgent delivery of X-Rays from the accident and emergency department at the Royal United Hospital in Bath to the specialist neurosurgery team at Frenchay. The rider was home before 10:30pm and I thought that was that until a call came in at 4:10am for an urgent delivery of X-Rays from Weston-super-Mare to the neurosurgeons at Frenchay. As a rider I hate early morning calls and I have now discovered it is no more pleasant being the coordinator at the time. I didn't feel like sleeping while the rider was out so I stayed up and waited until he was safely back home. At least it gave me a chance to catch up on my paperwork for the night's calls. Anyway, the job passed without incident and the rider was safely home by 6:00am. NHS money saved: £100. Time on the road: 4h30m

• East Bike: A call came in at 4:00pm but when I explained we didn't start until 7:00pm the hospital in Bath made other arrangements. Our rider then had a busy evening doing an urgent delivery of a CD-ROM containing scans from the children's ward at the RUH in Bath to the children's ward at Frenchay - another neurosurgery consultation. He then picked up a urine sample from St Martin's hospital to go to the RUH pathology labs, a set of notes to go from the RUH to the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases (also known as the Mineral Hospital because of its location right next to the famous Bath Spa), and then finally an urgent delivery of drugs to a patient's house in the beautiful city of Wells. NHS money saved: £90. Time on the road: 5h0m

I made a huge mistake at the beginning of the evening in thinking that I could do the coordinator role while mobile. I had to go over to Weston-super-Mare to see my mum. Most of the calls I got were while I was in the car. I initially gave our North bike rider a job to deliver some drugs from Weston-super-Mare to a patient's home in the town. However, when the urgent Frenchay to Southmead job came in I had to decline the Weston delivery. The hospital then came back to me to say it really was urgent as a mother had to give her handicapped son an injection by a specific time - talk about piling on the guilt! As the delivery involved both drugs and syringes they were not happy about giving it to a local taxi, so they begged me to reconsider. I was in Weston at the time so I agreed to do the job myself. I had the pleasure of handing over the drugs just 20 minutes later to a very grateful mother. Doing a blood bike call in my car felt very strange. And warm! NHS money saved: £10. Time on the road: 0h20m

Technorati tags: Volunteer, Motorcycle, Emergency

Posted by mikebelch ( Feb 16 2007, 08:05:55 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]