Coronavirus: More than £10,000 of personal protective equipment donated to local hospitals
More than £10,000 of medical safety equipment for frontline staff has been donated by Manchester Metropolitan University to the UK’s largest hospital trust.
The personal protective equipment (PPE) was collected from around the University and given to Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Manchester Royal Infirmary and the NHS Nightingale Hospital North West based at Manchester Central conference complex among others.
The trust thanked the University’s gesture and said it was “immensely grateful for the support it has received from partners” and that “the PPE donations have been very well received by staff”.
Two types of disposable gloves, safety glasses and over glasses, aprons, sterile alcohol wipes, hospital gowns, face masks and spirometers were among the donated kit picked by the trust on Tuesday last week.
Proud to support NHS
Dr Ian Tidmarsh, Technical Services Business Partner at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “In collaboration with academic colleagues, technical services teams from across three faculties facilitated the transfer critical PPE to the NHS.
“We are very proud of being able to support NHS frontline workers by donating over £10,000 of much needed supplies.
“This complements our other work focusing on the production of face shields lead by Mark Binks and PrintCity.”
Part of wider effort
Binks is a Technical Officer and business management apprentice who, after beginning to laser cut face shields in his own home workshop, set up the #Shields4Manchester crowd-sourced manufacturing collective that has produced more than 50,000 face shields so far for health professionals.
Staff at PrintCity, the University’s 3D additive and digital manufacturing facility, designed and 3D-printed a prototype device that hooks onto door handles and enables people to open it using their forearm instead of their hand. The accessory was trialled at a local nursery and the final design will be made freely available online.
The hub’s team also 3D-printed a batch of 1,200 face visors to a pre-approved design for the Northern Care Alliance NHS Group for use by clinical staff at Salford Royal Hospital in Salford, Greater Manchester.
Last week’s donation to the hospital trust followed a donation of PPE consumerables to The Fed, the leading social care charity for Greater Manchester’s Jewish community, in late April that included aprons, gloves and sterile wipes purposely set aside in the Brooks building when it closed.
Another contribution to the effort to tackle coronavirus came from the Technical Team at the University’s Manchester Fashion Institute, who built a digital design template for much-needed scrubs.
These patterns are being used to mass produce the medical garments at workshops run by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service after the University used its existing relationship with the service’s Public Sector Prison Industries to answer a call for help from a regional North West NHS trust experiencing shortages of some items of medical clothing.
