Freewheelers Emergency Voluntary Service is a registered charity that provides a free out-of-hours motorcycle courier service to hospitals in the South West of England.

Riding For Life: A registered charity (no. 1001067) founded in 1990, Freewheelers EVS has a coverage area that includes Somerset, Bristol, Bath, West Wiltshire, and South Gloucestershire. Freewheelers is one of a number of groups that cover different parts of the country.

Our lifesaving service to the NHS is provided free of charge and is funded entirely by public donation and sponsorship. We transport blood, pathology & microbiology specimens, patient notes, X-rays, frozen breast milk, and other medical supplies. In 2011, we made 3,400 deliveries, riding more than 130,000 miles. 

Freewheelers EVS operates a fleet of specially adapted BMW R1200RT and Honda ST1300 motorcycles equipped with high-visibility markings, plus blue lights and sirens for emergency use, which enable us to save lives by delivering urgently needed items safely and promptly. If our service did not exist hospitals would be forced to use a costly and potentially slow taxi, or commercial courier.

Freewheelers EVS is run entirely by volunteers. All our riders hold an advanced motorcycling qualification, such as the advanced riding test by RoSPA, or IAM. We also have a team of fund raisers and telephone co-ordinators. Incoming requests from hospitals are categorised by the on-duty co-ordinator as non-urgent, urgent, or emergency and the nearest of our three on-duty bikes is dispatched to assist. In June 2008, Freewheelers' volunteers were awarded The Queen's Award for Voluntary Service in recognition of their work as unsung heroes.

We are also founding members of the Nationwide Association of Blood Bikes, which represents the existing blood bike charities at a national level and helps new groups to get established.

Feel free to contact us if you would like more information.

Hospitals and other NHS institutions wishing to use the Freewheelers EVS service should call our duty co-ordinator on 0300 800 1907  during the following hours:

Monday-Friday - 19:00 to 07:00

Weekends & Bank Holidays - 24 hours

At the recent Heart of Somerset Awards, where Freewheelers won the Sarah Atkins Award, the following film by GRACE Productions was shown to highlight the work that we do. If you click full screen, then you can view the video on glorious 720p or 1080p high definition. 

You can see photographs taken during the filming in our photo gallery.

In 2011, Freewheelers spent £16,500 on petrol for their motorcycle fleet. 

The year started slowly with snow and ice restricting the use of our bikes. If we believed that the early weekly fuel bills of around £100 were to be the norm then we were in for a shock. Costs rose quickly, driven by higher pump prices and rising demand for our service from hospitals. By June our average weekly bill had risen to £400, with a record high of £568 on June 6th! For the rest of the year things settled down, but by the end our average bill was still around £350. 

Fuel accounts for about half the cost of running a vehicle. The rest is made up by mileage-dependent costs such as tyres and servicing, plus fixed costs like insurance and road tax. This means our total running costs for 2011 are over £30,000.

The graph on the right shows the individual fuel bills together with a rolling average. (Click for larger version)