Premature babies given donated milk have a better chance of survival Life-saving baby milk is being transported across Oxfordshire thanks to a team of dedicated volunteers on motorbikes. Until recently the milk bank at the John Radcliffe Hospital had difficulty accepting donations from outside Oxford. Mothers had to deliver their own milk which put some of them off. Now the charity Service by Emergency Rider Volunteers (SERV) has stepped in to help ship the frozen milk directly. The bank at The John Radcliffe Breastfeeding Clinic is one of only 17 specialist units in the UK that collects breast milk for premature babies. Sally Inch is the infant feeding specialist and milk bank coordinator: "For quite a long time the milk only came from Oxford and Oxfordshire, if we could work out how to get it here. "So we were very limited in where we could recruit from. We got put in touch with SERV and suddenly we're able to expand our horizons practically all over the country." 'Pleased' The motorbike emergency response riders at SERV move anything that is patient related. If it is urgent enough for the hospital to consider paying for a taxi or a courier to move they will do it for free. They have been transporting vital medical supplies around the country for the last 29 years but have only recently began transporting milk in Oxfordshire. "We got into milk banking almost by accident and we're quite pleased to be doing it," says John Stepney, the SERV county coordinator. The milk has to remain frozen so SERV use special containers that maintain its temperature. They have 40 of these containers in circulation and will soon increase the volume of the milk they are carrying. If a sick or premature baby is given donor milk instead of formula its chances of survival can increase up to ten times. Julie Page from North Oxford needed donated breast milk when her son Joseph was born.



"Joseph was a full term baby but he was very small. He was only 6lb 3oz. "The ward sister gave him some donated breast milk and that was enough to keep him going for the first two days of his life before my own milk came in." Julie is now able to donate her milk back to the milk bank and uses SERV to do that. They visit her once a fortnight to collect the milk she has stored in her own freezer. The motorbike riders from SERV have already made 320 journeys across the Oxfordshire region this year, saving the NHS thousands of pounds in the process.



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