SERC Helping to Meet Demand for PPE in the fight against Coronavirus

You will no doubt have heard in many news reports about the severe shortages of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in our hospital and healthcare settings. PPE is essentially any devices or appliances designed to be worn or held by an individual for protection against one or more health and safety hazards.

As you can image, we use a lot of this equipment in the College, from rubber gloves in hair and beauty, science and animal care programmes, to plastic aprons in catering and hospitality, to masks in motor vehicle and engineering to high viz vests in construction. Some of these items are required in our fight against Cornavirus and SERC is coordinating the collection of all the PPE in SERC facilities which can be passed on to the services that need it most.

We have also put a call out for any baby monitors that people might have at home which they are not using, again, to be passed on to healthcare teams. Contact AMcLoughlin@serc.ac.uk if you have any to offer

Meanwhile, our engineering teams, have been working to develop PPE in the form of a reusable face mask in which a filter can be replaced so one mask can be used many times. The team have been using the College’s 3D printing facility to make these. Obviously, they have been in touch with the relevant authorities to let them know we have the facilities to produce these items and are awaiting the necessary approval.