Fife's £500,000 anonymous benefactor sparks donation to Blood Bikes

A £500,000 anonymous donation to benefit Fife’s health staff and patients has boosted the coffers of another registered charity.

Blood Bikes Scotland has been given £5000 in recognition of its support throughout the coronavirus crisis.

It's the latest donation to come from the £500,000 windfall. Maggie’s Fife cancer care centre got £10,000, while 100 iPads have been bought to help people in hospital keep in touch with relatives unable to visit during lockdown.

Now, Fife Health Board Endowment Fund has made a donation to the Blood Bikes Scotland charity.

https://www.fifetoday.co.uk/news/people/how-wetherspoons-plans-re-open-its-fife-pubs-2862553

It provides a free transportation service for a number of health boards in Scotland including NHS Fife. The charity delivers small urgent items including specimens, baby milk, medication and medical equipment that urgently need to be transported from one site to another, or from a patient’s home in the community.

Using a fleet of 12 motorbikes and a sponsored car, it offers its services free of charge to the NHS in Scotland as a means of ‘giving something back’.

John Baxter, chairman of Blood Bikes Scotland, said: “We’re 100 per cent self-funded so we have to bring in our own money through grants, sponsorship, events or even shaking a tin in a supermarket – our potential to fundraise has changed dramatically with recent events and our opportunity to fundraise via events, sponsorships and tin shaking has pretty much stopped at the moment.

“This is a huge contribution to us and it will help us to run the bikes for an extended period whilst the pandemic is continuing.

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Prior to the covid-19 pandemic, Blood Bikes Scotland provided a weekend service to NHS Fife totalling 64 hours per month. The group is now supporting NHS Fife across seven days and their support has increased 700 per cent since the start of the pandemic.

The charity’s primary support over recent months has been to do two-hourly shuttle runs between NHS Fife’s drive-through testing facility at Cameron Hospital and the microbiology laboratory at the Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy.

These runs supplement the board’s own transport service and enables samples to get to the laboratories much quicker. This not only improves the overall efficiency of service, it also means that many of those tested can get their results earlier - in some cases the very same day.

Blood Bikes Scotland has also started to collect samples from local care homes to speed up the testing process and help reduce spread of the virus amongst some of Fife’s most vulnerable residents.

Swabs from more than 5000 people have been tested in Fife’s laboratories since local testing began. As many as 300 possible covid-19 samples can be processed each day and capacity continues to expand to meet the increasing demand for testing.

Tricia Marwick, who chairs the Endowment Fund’s Board of Trustees, said: “Blood Bikes Scotland have assisted NHS Fife for a number of years, and since the start of the pandemic their support has proven invaluable. The role they play in transporting samples is not only helping to increase testing capacity, it is also enabling many people to receive their results much earlier than they ordinarily would.

“The efforts of Blood Bikes Scotland in helping NHS Fife to respond to covid-19 cannot be underestimated.”

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