Distillery donates batch to VGH
Health-care staff at Vancouver General Hospital are grateful for their new supply of hand sanitizer — even though it smells more like a cocktail lounge than an operating room.
“When it first arrived, I saw people sniffing their hands and laughing. It smells like whiskey,” anesthesiologist Dr. Neil Ramsay joked. “We have to tell our patients we haven’t had a morning drink. It is just the hand sanitizer.”
The donation of 2,000 litres of hand sanitizer came from Shelter Point Distillery on Vancouver Island, which has pivoted from its usual production of fine whisky to making this crucial hygiene product for some front-line organizations.
Ramsay said this is one of several examples he has seen during the COVID -19 pandemic of local companies offering products or materials to aid the health-care system.
“All these businesses are losing so much money. Despite that they want to help,” he said.
Ramsay sits on a VGH committee that monitors supplies during the pandemic, and learned from the hospital’s distributor that hand sanitizer stocks were low. He began to worry in mid-March that VGH could run out.
“We use hand sanitizer a lot, and our use for that was going up rapidly,” he said.
He reached out to his friend Chris Nelson, the owner of Pacific Sands Beach Resort in Tofino, who was an investor in Shelter Point. Within 48 hours, the hand sanitizer was delivered by the Campbell River distillery to the Vancouver hospital.
“It was phenomenal,” Ramsay said.
The distillery has paused making spirits, and Nelson and his wife, who live in Vancouver, donated $25,000 in March so it could instead produce hand sanitizer, which has now been donated to Victoria General Hospital, the Salvation Army in the Downtown Eastside and VGH.
“We’d like to be producing spirits, but are trying to do our part given the moment we are all in,” said Nelson.
Nelson closed his resort in mid-March and offered the empty rooms to Tofino hospital healthcare workers who need to self-isolate from their families.
Many British Columbia residents and businesses have stepped up to help in a variety of ways during this pandemic, despite facing economic challenges of their own.
Postmedia wrote about one of these companies, Burnaby-based Mustang Survival, which normally manufactures high-performance marine survival gear but is now helping to produce 90,000 reusable isolation gowns for medical workers.
Mustang has also developed a “hood” for doctors like Ramsay, who must intubate — insert a breathing tube into — COVID-19 patients, a complex medical procedure that often leaves them covered in spittle that carries the contagious virus. Face masks and googles keep the spittle off doctors’ faces, but their exposed necks would get covered.
After reading about health-care workers in Italy getting infected, Ramsay asked Mustang if they could build a hood that was breathable, water resistant and easy to remove without spreading any potential droplets to other areas of their bodies.
A prototype by Mustang has now been approved, and Ramsay hopes 100 of the hoods will soon arrive at VGH. Other hospitals have also expressed an interest in them.
“They give us very good protection, just gives us extra confidence,” Ramsay said. “I just want to thank people for all the help.”