Firm making 100,000 visors a week

A BUSINESSMAN’S plastics firm has developed a safety-visor to protect NHS and care workers as well as others on the frontline of the fight against coronavirus.

Graham Kershaw, from Macclesfield, is owner of Macpac, which is currently able to produce around 100,000 face-shields per week at its factory but could double its output if required.

Over the Easter weekend boss Graham handed out hundreds to pharmacies, care homes and nurses around his home town of Macclesfield before full production began this week.

The lightweight guard is designed to sit comfortably against the forehead and at an angle which allows staff to also wear glasses, protective goggles or face masks.

With Macpac, which is based in Heaton Mersey, Stockport, already set up to provide packaging for the pharmaceutical industry - and its visor approved by the government regulator - Graham says the firm is ideally placed to deliver the gear to where it is desperately needed.

And with horror stories reaching him from the frontline of the Covid-19 pandemic he and his 55-strong team felt they had to ‘do their bit’.

Graham said: “It’s terrifying, one of the head buyers for one of the NHS trusts told me there were surgeons operating on Covid-19 patients without any protective equipment, that really upset me.”

Macpac’s operation is entirely non-profit making but, being a small firm, is now having to sell rather than donate its visors.

“We are not trying to make money.

“Ours are some of the cheapest you can get. We just wanted to help everybody.

“The team wanted to muck in and do something, we are seeing products out there and we can make them.

“As soon as we realised we could we thought ‘right, we have got to do this’.”

Orders can be placed via online with each box containing 25 visors with loose elastic straps and easy assembly instructions.

Boxes are priced at £68.79 each.

To order visit https:// plantpac.net/shop/misc/ face-visor/.