A charity has offered to provide free PPE in response to an appeal for better protection from the Royal College of Nursing who fear that nurses’ lives are at risk from new variants of coronavirus.
The RCN wants all NHS staff to be given the kinds of high-grade face FFP2 or FFP3 masks used in intensive care units.
Frontline Live, the rapid response digital platform built and run by volunteers to keep frontline workers safe in crisis, has supplies of FFP2 face masks ready and waiting to be delivered to vulnerable healthcare workers.
Dame Donna Kinnair, chief executive and general secretary of the RCN, has said that “staff picking up this virus at work are angered at any suggestion they have stopped following the rules – this is down to the new variant and the dangerous shortage of adequate protection”.
Health care workers anywhere in the UK can report PPE shortages on the Frontline Live website or tweet their need using three hashtags: #FrontlineMap #postcode #PPEneed and, with the support of MyHermes, free PPE will be delivered to them within two days.
Katz Kiely, Chair of Trustees of Frontline Live, said: “It’s clear that the lives of our healthcare workers are at risk because they do not have the right PPE. We have the right PPE available – all they have to do is ask.”
Frontline Live works with MedSupplyDrive UK, a charity founded and run by doctors, collects money for and donations of high-quality PPE. Healthcare Workers’ Foundation, a charity working to increase the well-being and welfare of healthcare workers, are storing that free high-quality PPE and have agreed to provide logistics.
Charity Frontline Live is a rapid response platform built and run by volunteers to keep frontline workers safe in crisis. The pandemic has proved centralised systems and traditional procurement frameworks are not agile enough to respond to need in times of crisis. So Frontline Live volunteers built a decentralised platform that has empowered citizens and communities across the UK, letting them respond rapidly to needs as they appear.
