THANKS A MILLION!
Mail-backed charity donates £1m in lab equipment to keep hospital staff safe
THOUSANDS of frontline NHS workers are to receive more than £1million of high-speed Covid testing kit – thanks to a major initiative by Mail Force.
The charity so generously backed by our readers will provide £290,000 of equipment for one of the largest children’s hospitals in Europe, Alder Hey in Liverpool.
Mail Force is donating machines to ramp up testing and purification systems to maximise the hospital’s capacity ahead of its busiest period of the year.
Our historic campaign has received overwhelming support from all corners of the kingdom – so the charity is determined that the whole of the country will benefit.
Specialist diagnostic units, each worth £80,000, will soon be on their way to three island trusts – Stornoway in the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland – greatly reducing the number of test samples that have to be flown to the mainland. Many more results will, instead, be returned locally in under an hour.
Major hospitals in Stockport, Leicester and London’s East End are earmarked for a total of £250,000 of machinery that will ramp up testing capacity for staff and patients.
It all follows Mail Force’s announcement three weeks ago of a £300,000 donation of testing kit for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London.
The charity is taking similar steps at Alder Hey for the same reason – that both are world-class institutions treating children from all over the country. Mail Force is now awaiting bids for a further £100,000 of test equipment for other UK hospitals.
The charity’s new initiative exceeds £1million and was last night applauded as ‘great news’ by Professor Stephen Powis, the NHS’s national medical director. He added: ‘Thanks to Mail Force, patients and staff across the country will benefit from additional state-of-the-art testing equipment and technology.
‘As a result, thousands more tests for coronavirus can now be completed by machine, freeing up NHS staff time and helping turn around Covid test results more quickly for patients in need of urgent care.’
This newspaper launched Mail Force in April as an emergency response to the national shortage of personal protective equipment facing frontline healthcare staff.
Donations poured in from tens of thousands of Mail readers and leading philanthropists, and the total has passed £11million. Mail Force has since procured a vast range of PPE and sent tens of millions of items to grateful hospitals, care homes and charities around Britain.
Driven by the original purpose of helping frontline staff, the charity’s trustees have now allocated funds for testing equipment on the basis that this is now the most pressing issue when it comes to protecting healthcare staff.
As with our PPE, the technology has been commissioned in close consultation with NHS procurement teams, to ensure the most appropriate kit goes to the right places.
The list includes a £150,000 Swissbuilt Hamilton STAR robotic pipetting system, used in larger laboratories, to help process thousands of tests every day. The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel will receive one of those.
‘I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to Daily Mail readers for their enormous generosity,’ said Alwen Williams, group chief executive of Barts Health NHS Trust, yesterday. ‘The Royal London cares for some of the most deprived parts of East London. This donation will not only make a difference to our patients ahead of their planned surgery but also to our incredible staff who are working around the clock.’
Other trusts will receive the £50,000 Thermofisher Kingfisher which extracts DNA and its sibling, RNA, from swab samples.
Both the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and Stockport NHS Foundation Trust can look forward to receiving these.
The three island-based hospital trusts in Scotland are each to receive a standalone system called a BD Max which can operate in the simplest laboratory setting without specialist training.
Thanking Mail readers, Colin Sinclair, chief executive of NHS National Services Scotland, said: ‘These machines will support their continued hard work safeguarding our island communities.’
THE SNP trumpeted yesterday’s crime figures as proof that Scotland is getting safer. Yet violent offences have soared – and even police admit the harm caused by criminality is increasing.
The raft of bleak statistics renders the Nationalists’ rhetoric a pitiful charade.
Among them is the disclosure that the proportion of sex crimes solved is at the lowest level since 1979.
Cases of offensive weapons being used for other criminal purposes have risen by 10 per cent to more than 5,000.
That makes a mockery of repeated claims of a get-tough approach to knife crime.
This soft-touch Government is letting crime get out of control.
WHILE it’s not unusual for the insurance industry to scrape the bottom of the barrel, its latest avaricious antics are despicable. The super-rich insurers are trying to wriggle out of paying small businesses that were forced, through no fault of their own, to close during the pandemic.
Despite being ordered by the High Court to cough up, they have arrogantly dug in their heels. Yet by appealing the ruling, they are condemning countless small firms to the scrapheap – shattering lives and livelihoods. During the Covid emergency, the Government and banks responded with commendable speed to shore up struggling businesses. It speaks volumes that the insurance sharks merely shrugged their shoulders instead of playing a part.
FROM Shetland to Stockport, Liverpool to London, your incredible generosity continues to make a huge difference on the Covid front line.
Having already delivered millions of items of PPE to medical staff and care workers, the MailForce charity is now supplying desperately needed coronavirus testing machines to hospitals.
Your magnificent £11million donations to our historic campaign have made the lives of countless medics and patients safer.
In these difficult days, that’s a truly awesome achievement.