Mail Force’s PPE for Harry-backed children’s charity
A CHARITY for sick children championed by Prince Harry yesterday thanked Mail Force for donating desperatelyneeded face masks.
WellChild will pass the personal protective equipment on to families whose lives have been plunged into chaos by the Covid-19 crisis.
For them, lockdown was not just an inconvenience but a disaster. Many were reliant on carers coming into their homes to help with the round-the-clock, complex medical care that their disabled children need.
But overnight, carers stopped coming over fears of passing the virus to the vulnerable youngwas sters or catching it themselves.
Some of the more severely affected children require 24hour help and this has left their parents exhausted after three months of lockdown.
Yesterday the Mail Force charity delivered boxes of surgical masks to WellChild, whose patron is the Duke of Sussex.
Mail Force was set up by this newspaper and our partners to deliver PPE to those fighting the war against the virus.
During the pandemic, Harry has been speaking to charity staff and parents with sick children via video calls.
Tara Parker, director of programmes at WellChild, said: He always remembers the children he meets or speaks to, even if it ages ago.’ At the charity’s awards ceremony last year, the prince told the audience: ‘Speaking to all of you pulls at my heart strings in a way I could have never understood until I had a child of my own.’
WellChild’s mission is to help ill children thrive by supporting them in their family homes, often with the help of carers.
But Mrs Parker said when coronavirus struck, there was a ‘real panic’ among parents as they were concerned that carers ‘might unwittingly bring the virus into a house’.
Mrs Parker, a former head of nursing at St George’s Hospital in south London, has a severely disabled daughter of her own and said: ‘There was no way we could turn our back on these people. I knew the problems these families had.’
In just ten days the charity set up a nationwide emergency PPE service, begging and persuading in order to build supplies.
WellChild has lost 60 per cent of its income this year and they have furloughed staff, according to the director of communications Matt James.
But he said they have now had a sudden surge in demand for help, adding: ‘There are two options – either shut up shop and say “see you on the other side”, or meet the crisis head on. Our mission is to give sick children the chance to thrive and nothing changed that. So we just adapted – fast.’
So far WellChild has helped over a thousand families by sending more than 145,000 items of PPE. And now Mail Force has replenished stocks with 28,000 masks. It was part of an airlift of four million masks earlier this week – three million of which have been handed to the NHS.
Overall, two billion items of PPE have been delivered to the NHS and care homes by the Government since the start of the pandemic. And a further 28 billion items have been ordered.
Mr James said without the ability to let carers back into their homes, many parents will reach ‘breaking point’.
But he added: ‘Thanks to Mail Force, we can really help get things moving again.’
‘We can get things moving again’