Cornwall Freewheelers - Background Research

Now that I know roughly what my documentary will be about, I have decided to research into the company that it will be based around. 


The Cornwall Freewheelers are a registered charity (Registered with the Charity Commission 1140165) operating throughout Cornwall providing a completely free of charge emergency response courier service to the NHS. 

The objectives of the charity is to relieve sickness and protect patient health by the provision of transport of urgently needed blood, drugs, human tissues, and other medical requirements between hospitals and blood transfusion banks.

Their services are offered to any NHS establishment, on an out of hours basis from 5pm to 7am in the morning; monday to friday.  During weekends and bank holidays their services are offered on a 24 hour basis.  

The freewheelers provide a service outside the hours of the regular transport services; thereby providing a massive saving to hospitals in contractor courier fees, taxi fees, front line ambulance crews and even air ambulances.

This service is available to community midwives, district nurses and doctors on Call. All of their services are offered by volunteers, who have received advanced training and undergo regular reviews of their skills.  They give up their time to serve the community and save lives.  They do this in the knowledge that they will probably never meet the beneficiary and that the same person will probably never know of their services nor that they have played any part in their recovery.  

The freewheelers emergency response vehicles are fully kitted and adapted to carry the systems, which are NHS approved for maintaining the cool chain from collection to delivery and our volunteers have even used their own bikes to transport non-urgent items that have no control requirements.  All of the personnel carry official identity cards which are worn at all times when on duty.