Doncaster firm teams up with Daily Mail to make 500,000 PPE face shields for NHS

Kingsbury Press, which is located within the iPort development, has teamed up with the Daily Mail’s Mail Force charity to produce the kit for frontline key workers in the fight against coronavirus.

The latest van full of life saving equipment was delivered to the world famous Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge earlier this week.

All the 20,000 masks and 60 visors were, for the first time, manufactured entirely in Britain.

Addenbrooke’s head of nursing Helen Balson told the newspaper that the delivery ‘will mean a huge amount’ to the hospital trust’s 11,000 staff, who have been battling coronavirus for six months.

‘We also need more masks for visitors as they start coming back to the hospital to see family and friends so it will help with that too,’ she said.

‘I’d like to say thank you to all the Mail readers. It means so much that people give their money to help the NHS.’

The hospital gets through more than 10,000 masks a day, as well as 20,000 aprons and 1,500 specialist FFP3 masks.

Sally Stokes, senior procurement manager at Addenbrooke’s, said it was ‘incredible’ to see people’s generosity.

‘It has been very, very stressful the last few months,’ she said. ‘The biggest challenge has been the demand of trying to get PPE. The whole world wants PPE.

'We’re very proud because we never ran out of anything, even at the peak. But we were probably very close – within hours of running out.’

The delivery represents just a fraction of the more than 30 million items of PPE that have now been supplied to the coronavirus frontline thanks to the £11 million that Mail readers and supporters have donated so far.

The masks were made at Bluetree, a printing company based near Rotherham while Kingsbury Press, which is based on Ontario Drive in Doncaster, has retrained its workers to help produce the visors.