Blood bikers helping to speed up vital baby test results in Lincolnshire over festive period

• ITV News' Jonathan Brown reports

Volunteer blood bike riders are helping to speed up the time it takes for parents to receive their newborn babies' blood results over the festive period.Thanks to a donation by a company in Hessle, riders will help transport blood spot tests between maternity wards across Lincolnshire and labs at Sheffield Children's Hospital over the festive period.Every baby born in the UK receives a blood spot test five days after birth to check for conditions including cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease. The tests are normally sent to the lab by post, but to avoid potential delays in the postal service during the Christmas and New Year holidays, the Lincolnshire Emergency Blood Bike Service (LEBBS) will hand-deliver approximately 800 samples by mid-January.Amanda Mumby-Croft, a community midwife, said getting test results back quickly is "imperative" in helping identify and treat potentially dangerous illnesses in the first few days of a baby's life. "It's very normal to have worries when you have a newborn baby anyway, so it's something that [parents] can obviously put to one side and think, yes that is being taken care of and that's one less thing to worry about," she said."We all feel like we want to give something back, that we want to do something altruistic," said Paul Evans from LEBBS.

"And if we can mix that with our hobby - which is riding bikes - then everybody's a winner."Christmas is about children, isn't it? So what better way to spend your time?"

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