And that's a wrap...

Today our volunteers have finished spreading festive cheer to the last of the Children’s Wards we visited in our Blood Bikes Santa Run 2025. Since we began this annual event it has grown year on year thanks to the generosity of those who support it. Back in 2017 we began by supporting one hospital but this year we are dropping off 126 giant Santa bags to 18 different Children’s wards, both in-patient and out-patient, at 12 different hospitals across our region.

On our Santa Run today we visited County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, Gateshead NHS and The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (Newcastle Hospitals Charity)

Darlington Memorial Hospital, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, The Great North Children’s Hospital at Royal Victoria Infirmary and The Children’s Heart Unit at Freeman Hospital.

We would like to say thanks to all of our volunteers, their friends, family and colleagues for their donations. With special thanks to Reece Foundation for donating £10,000, without this extremely generous donation we would not have been able to include the additional Children’s Wards, plus our thanks go out to everyone who donated to our Crowdfunding page, Pearson Engineering Ltd, Nissan, DFS Furniture for collecting gifts and the couple in Smyths Durham who saw our Blood Bike Elf busy in the store so made a lovely donation of toys. Of course we couldn't forget our thanks to our volunteer Daniel Millard who was our official photographer this year.