Mail Force PPE delivery is the best of British!
20,000 masks for top hospital all made here
DELIGHTED nurses at one of Britain’s top hospitals stepped out into the sunshine this week to unload the latest van full of life-saving Mail Force PPE.
And the 20,000 masks and 60 visors presented to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge were for the first time manufactured entirely in Britain.
The Mail Force charity – set up by this newspaper and our partners and backed by generous readers – collected the vital home-grown kit from a factory just 125 miles up the road in Yorkshire, where two printing companies have rapidly transformed themselves to meet the demands of the crisis.
Addenbrooke’s head of nursing Helen Balson said the delivery ‘will mean a huge amount’ to the hospital trust’s 11,000 staff, who have been battling coronavirus for six months.
‘We also need more masks for visitors as they start coming back to the hospital to see family and friends so it will help with that too,’ she said.
‘I’d like to say thank you to all the Mail readers. It means so much that people give their money to help the NHS.’
Every single piece of the PPE delivered to Addenbrooke’s – which was founded in 1766 and is now one of the country’s major teaching hospitals – is precious. The hospital gets through more than 10,000 masks a day, as well as 20,000 aprons and 1,500 specialist FFP3 masks.
While there are currently just seven patients in the hospital with coronavirus and none in intensive care, during the peak of the crisis it had 135 Covid19 patients on its wards. Sally Stokes, senior procurement manager at Addenbrooke’s, said it was ‘incredible’ to see people’s generosity.
‘It has been very, very stressful the last few months,’ she said. ‘The biggest challenge has been the demand of trying to get PPE. The whole world wants PPE. We’re very proud because we never ran out of anything, even at the peak. But we were probably very close – within hours of running out.’
She said doctors and nurses working gruelling shifts in the heat were boosted by such ‘fantastic examples of public support’.
‘The medical staff on Covid wards have to wear visors for 12-hour shifts and, because they’ve got to be so tight, it gives them bruises.
‘Then in this heat it is so hard for the clinical people,’ she said. ‘This is another fantastic example of the support we have received from members of the public during the outbreak.
‘Personal protective equipment has been a vital weapon in the fight against Covid-19.’
The trust’s Rachel Thaxter, lead nurse for infection prevention and control, said it was a comfort to staff to know that stocks of PPE were replenished after the dangerous days at the peak of the pandemic.
‘It was a very anxious time for all the doctors and nurses. We were very short of visors at one stage,’ she said.
The delivery to Addenbrooke’s represents just a fraction of the more than 30 million items of PPE that have now been supplied to the coronavirus frontline thanks to the astonishing £11million that Mail readers and supporters have donated so far.
While Mail Force will continue to deliver PPE from all over the world, depending on availability, more than half of the essential kit the charity hands out is now being produced on these shores.
The masks the Addenbrooke’s nurses received were made at Bluetree, a fast-growing printing company based near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, with which the Government is also placing an order.
And the face shields came from the order for half a million which Mail Force has placed with Doncasterbased Kingsbury Press, another printing firm which is retraining staff to provide quality equipment for healthcare workers.
Like every piece of Mail Force PPE, they have been approved and pre-tested by Department of Health inspectors.
30 MILLION REASONS TO CHEER
From Saturday’s Mail ‘We were within hours of running out’