A teacher is leading production of almost a thousand protective visors a day as part of the fight against coronavirus – all from his Design and Technology classroom.
Mark Smith has turned Leighton Park School in Reading into a hub with ten other local schools and businesses in Berkshire to supply hospitals, GPs and care homes in the local area with vital protective facewear.
Mr Smith is one of a number of DT teachers who responded to a drive on social media to help make visors to protect those on the frontline from the spread of covid-19.
He told the Mirror: “It’s testament to the team here how everyone has done their bit to make it happen – if it were just a one man band like I started with we would be producing tiny numbers.”
Mr Smith, who has a background in biomedical engineering and used to work in the NHSas an orthotist making corrective splints and orthopaedic footwear, started making them on a small scale with the material already in the department.
But that all changed when some of them were offered to the local hospital – the Royal Berkshire.
One of his colleagues, who was collecting the schools’ visors from the science department to take to the hospital where his wife worked, took along some of the visors Mr Smith was producing.
He said: “the interest in them straight away was quite apparent – I don’t think I had any idea how desperate people were for the visors, I took another couple down to my GP’s for them to have a look and they bit my arm off for them- they wanted 20 there and then.”
Mr Smith quickly got his colleagues involved and they put a call out to the other schools in the area to see if any of them had a laser cut.
Initially he aimed to make 200 visors but soon realised his team could be much more ambitious.
He set up a gofundme page and hit his £1,000 target in two and a half hours – it now stands at more than £16,000. Local businesses have also contacted him and one is able to produce 400 in a day.
He now says he is able to produce 1,200 a day with everyone working at full capacity
“We seem to have become a logistical hub. We’ve got some people here who are brilliant with spreadsheets and really organised so we’ve become a bit of a regional hub and we’re ordering polypropylene,” he said.
“At the moment we’ve got the material to produce tens of thousands, we’ve got people running phones. Our IT department has set up phones in our workshop. We’ve got a board of how many we’ve got to produce, who we’ve got to deliver to – so a full logistics hub.”
On Thursday the team delivered 500 to the urgent care unit at the local hospital who then asked for a further 500.
Wokingham Borough Council and Reading Council have also ordered some and Mr Smith has been in contact with the local police and the YMCA.
The visor is made of a polypropylene band which can be disinfected and then it a has tabs and you put a clear PVC sheet over it.
This is an A4 sheet of plastic which is punched with a normal hole punch.
The plastic sheet is disposable and thrown away after use.
Mr Smith is keen to stress he did not come up with the design but has just “jumped on the bandwagon”.
Mr Smith says the school has been overwhelmed with how many people want to help.
“Lots of people here have seen it on the news and want to help, people have offered to be on the workshop overnight so we can keep the laser cutter going, we have people manning the phones, the computers, delivering”.
He had 1,700 visors requested in a single day and says: “The number seems to be growing exponentially as word spreads”.
And for the moment they have the materials to meet that demand with 32,000 sheets of PVC and 1,000 sheets or a tonne of polypropylene.
Mr Smith said it was important for him personally to be able to help but that it also fits in with the school’s ethos.
He said: “My brother and sister-in-law are both healthcare workers, they’re all frontline to staff so to feel I can do something and the facilities we have
“We’re a Quaker school so it fits very much with our ethos – which is ‘let your life speak’ so doing something you can do and offering it up to the community.”
You can donate to the gofundme page here: www.gofundme.com/f/covid19-face-shields-for-frontline-nhs-staff
