Desperate medics use charity cash to set up test centre
DESPERATE medics are resorting to charity and online fundraising to obtain facemasks, goggles, coronavirus tests and even ventilators as frustration grows at the lack of NHS equipment.
Doctors, academics and ordinary people have mobilised to source essential kit and are even setting up testing stations for the public.
But they say they are having to overcome numerous bureaucratic obstacles to make things happen.
One team of GPs, nurses and doctors’ surgery staff have built a drive-through NHS coronavirus testing centre in Tonbridge, Kent.
The marquee – wide enough for four cars and set up on school land – should enable thousands of people, including health workers, to finally get tested for the virus.
Within 30 hours of an email appeal going out asking for donations, they had raised £15,000, said photographer Martin Barraud, who sent the message.
He wrote: ‘By doing this testing, they can dramatically reduce the pressure on the system locally which may, in turn, directly affect you and those you love.’
Mr Barraud said tests are by appointment only, adding: ‘How can you help? They need stuff. Lots of stuff.’
Equipment needed includes hazmat suits, pulse oximeters, which monitor a person’s oxygen saturation, and hand sanitiser dispensers which cost £25 each, as well as £70 specialist thermometers and mobile phones.
David Harkness, o wner o f Regency Design in nearby Godstone, Surrey, said he had made £3,000 worth of signs for the hub for free. Mr Harkness, who is also making protective polycarbonate visors for NHS staff, added: ‘Under the circumstances I just wouldn’t charge.’
Meanwhile, Chinese- born academics have raised £50,000 to buy personal protective equipment (PPE) from their homeland and donate it to NHS hospitals.
Professor Daqing Ma, of Imperial College, London, said: ‘We’ve ordered £25,000 worth of goggles and visors, and we’ve had an offer from a Chinese company which wants to give us 20,000 face masks – either for NHS staff or for public use.’
However, Professor Ma, general secretary of the Association of British Chinese Professors, warned the plans were being held up by demands for them to pay VAT on the imports.
He added: ‘We really need them to waive VAT so we can get this equipment to those who need it.’
The organisation also wants to buy hazmat suits for intensive care teams, as experience from Wuhan in China, where the virus originated, shows the suits radically cut the risk of doctors and nurses falling sick.
Elsewhere, one hospital doctor told The Mail on Sunday he had sourced more than 1,000 ventilators from overseas but was having trouble with NHS bureaucracy.
He warned: ‘Things are happening so slowly that it’s not going to arrive in time and people are going to die unnecessarily.’
A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘In the past two weeks the NHS Supply Chain has delivered 170 million PPE equipment to NHS Trusts and 58,000 healthcare settings, including GPs, pharmacies and community providers.’
That figure includes 42 million gloves, 23 million surgical face masks, a million heavy-duty FFP3 masks, 13 million aprons, two million eye protectors and ten million items of cleaning equipment ordered in the past three days.