Up and down the country, why your donations mean so much to so many
From protective gear for charities to kit for hospitals, how your Mail Force millions continue to plug the gaps ...
While you are reading this, Tracy linstead, 43, will probably be asleep. She is a healthcare assistant for Marie Curie, caring for terminally ill people in their homes – usually at night.
Sometimes she is looking after someone with late- stage cancer who lives alone; sometimes she is helping a family get a decent night’s sleep by sitting up until morning with a loved one with dementia or Parkinson’s disease.
Whatever their illnesses, her patients are, for obvious reasons, at the far end of the vulnerable spectrum. That means rigorous use of top-quality PPe – which is where Mail Force comes in. ‘i can get through several masks a night and then there is all the other kit too,’ she whispers over the phone as she settles down for another night on duty in her home county of Devon. ‘it’s surprising how much we go through.’ Tracy cannot afford any gaps in her PPe supply. When she arrives at a patient’s house, she must be fully togged-up before she steps through the door. After every visit, she logs all the PPe she has used so that she knows what is left and what needs topping up.
Thanks to Mail Force – and a few other people along the way – it just keeps on coming. Our charity is now committed to keeping Marie Curie stocked with PPe for the winter. every f ew weeks between now and the end of January, the Mail Force lorry will be delivering hundreds of thousands of masks and aprons to Marie Curie depots around the country.
From there, however, it needs to be despatched to an army of charity workers scattered far and wide. in the South West alone, Marie Curie’s regional team of 250 nurses will get through 20,000 pieces of protective equipment in a week. Distributing all that – from Penzance to Bournemouth – is easy enough if you’re a retailer, but not if you are a charity counting the pennies. Fortunately, Marie Curie has some extra help.
The Spar supermarket chain has arranged for its South West distribution arm, Appleby Westward, to drop off PPe supplies addressed to each nurse at their nearest Spar branch. it means that healthcare workers in the field can simply drop in at their local store and pick up their PPe when it suits them, often at night en route to work.
‘We are incredibly grateful to Mail Force for the PPe and to Spar for their outstanding support in the South West,’ says Marie Curie’s chief nurse, Julie Pearce, adding that a similar arrangement is under way in the North of england.
‘it’s a great system and it just makes things that little bit easier,’ says Tracy linstead. MuCh l ater i n the evening, she sends me an email while she watches over her sleeping patient, an elderly man who lives alone. ‘he has no family or friends we can call,’ she says.
‘us having the PPe available really can make a difference as to whether a patient dies alone or has somebody with them at the end. To me, the most important part of my role is to treat a patient as i would want my loved ones to be treated and make them feel safe and not alone. Thank you!’ There, in a nutshell, is why your donations have meant so much to so many.
it is the same story with Mencap, which cares for thousands of people with a learning disability. During the summer, Mail Force was delighted to give the charity a l arge donation of masks and aprons. it made a substantial difference, so much so that we wanted to help Mencap through the second wave of coronavirus this winter. All told, Mail Force will end up providing the charity with 4.4million pieces of PPe to help its crucial work.
i have come to Salisbury to pay a visit (outdoors only, of course) to one of hundreds of operations which Mencap runs across the uK. This terraced house is home to five women, aged from 37 to 76, living with a range of learning disabilities and assisted by a team of eight staff. having been with Mencap f or 12 years, support worker Karen Shearing explains the
importance of PPE to daily life here. ‘We could not give our ladies the same quality of life without it,’ she says. ‘We are providing a lot of close contact support – personal and emotional support – and you can’t do that at a two-metre distance.’ Routine and familiarity are essential to a place like this.
So it was a challenge when the virus struck in the spring, forcing the instant cancellation of regular trips to day centres and the local swimming pool.
Another challenge was introducing the requisite PPE for staff without alarming the residents. ‘We tried to make putting on masks as much fun as possible and it seems to have worked,’ says Karen. IT
is clearly a very happy place with gales of laughter coming out of the kitchen. I get a cheery wave from Mel, 47, whom staff call ‘the lockdown legend’ because of her enthusiasm for all the home-based activities introduced since the pandemic began.
‘We are having to do more in the house than ever before. We’ve also started a café in the garden to make things more fun,’ Karen explains. ‘It’s working really well. But we still need to change our PPE every few hours and I am probably getting through five masks a day.
‘That’s just how things have to be. So a huge thank you to Mail Force.’ Like every charity, Mencap is struggling. 2020 was supposed to have been a bumper year because the charity was the main beneficiary of the London Marathon. Instead, donations have nose-dived.
The charity has been doing all it can to bolster morale – its patron, the Countess of Wessex, joined Mencap supporters running a virtual London Marathon through Windsor Great Park last month – but no one is going to look back on this year with any enthusiasm. At least Mail Force has helped to fill a gap.
This campaign has always been about protecting those who do the caring – and that includes testing.
Mail Force’s final donation – amounting to more than £90,000 – goes to the hospital which handled the very first case of Covid-19 in the UK.
Newcastle - upon-Tyne NHS Foundation Trust, which has 1.7million patients within i ts immediate orbit and many more across the wider region it serves, will receive a new Kingfisher purification system for extracting the virus from samples.
It will also receive two microbiologically- secure safety cabinets and a system for archiving serum containing antibodies.
‘All this makes a real difference in terms of accelerating testing, accelerating the learning curve and protecting our staff,’ says the trust’s chairman, Professor Sir John Burn, the distinguished clinical geneticist.
‘We have to think of this pandemic as rather like flying a plane while we are still building it.
‘So this machinery will be pivotal both i n terms of testing and research now.
‘But it will be really helpful in dealing with other viruses in the future too.’
For while Newcastle may have been the first hospital to handle the current coronavirus – and Sir John is very proud of the way his colleagues rose to the challenge that day – he has no doubt that something else will be coming down the track in due course.