Aiming to fill the short-term gap between immediate demand and commercial supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) becoming available, volunteers crowdsourced visor designs from the Makespace community; shortlisted a design from the list and wrote a statement of processes for manufacturing them; sourced materials (despite a national plastic shortage); set up shifts; made 5472 visors using a laser cutter; wrote a piece of software to control and track batches, and published the statement of processes for other community groups.
Visors have now been distributed to over 40 local organisations, including hospitals, hospices, care homes, GP surgeries and schools throughout the Eastern region.
Makespace volunteer Julia Citron says: "The first thousand masks we made, we gave to Addenbrooke's and then they realised that they actually needed many more than we could make. So they took the document that we'd written together, describing exactly what the visors needed to look like and how they needed to be made. And they've given it to a factory who's now manufacturing 10,000 of these visors a week. So we had 4,000 visors to give away to community organisations."
The visors were all provided free-of-charge; Makespace sponsored all the materials and equipment, and over 80 volunteers contributed to development and shifts making them.
In addition, it became apparent that Addenbrooke's had a large supply of surgical masks which weren't tight enough to be safe. They shared a specification for a cardboard disposable mask clip which could be taken off with one hand, which in turn was shared with the Makespace community and COVID design volunteers.
Over 15 people came up with design ideas and two shortlisted designs were prototyped and shared with hospital staff. One design was scaled up and a volunteer co-ordinator put together a rota and staffed 10 shifts. The production team made 53000 mask clips, but Addenbrooke's gets through over 10,000 a day. Through this project, Addenbrooke's came into contact with several factories who are now making thousands of mask clips every day.
Claire Ruskin, Cambridge Network's Executive Director, says: "Cambridge is practical as well as collaborative, and teams like this are setting a great example in quietly getting on to help. No fuss, just great results that are shared with others."