Coventry University donates protective equipment to frontline staff

Protective equipment
University news

Thursday 02 April 2020

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Coventry University has donated crucial personal protective equipment in a bid to help frontline care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 400 pairs of protective goggles and tens of thousands of plastic gloves have been given to Warwickshire County Council’s public health team to be distributed to care home workers in the county after they made a request to the university for any spare equipment.

Access to PPE has been one of the biggest challenges for those tackling the pandemic and Coventry University’s Ann Green, head of School of Life Sciences, has donated the equipment to ease the burden on and improve the working conditions for care home workers in the county.

If you look across the country, there has been a struggle to distribute equipment to where it is needed so we are making sure it gets to the frontline.

It’s equipment we had ready for undergraduate teaching which we’re not going to use while the university is closed so we’re sending it to where it’s needed and where it’s going to be used.

Stuart Henderson-Andrews, lab manager at Coventry University's School of Health and Life Sciences

This is just one of many ways in which Coventry University staff and students have been helping our public services tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 25 PhD students have volunteered to help University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire with COVID-19 testing in the coming weeks and around 50 paramedic students from the university have taken up frontline roles with West Midlands Ambulance Service.

The university’s health simulation facilities in the Alison Gingell building have also been made available for local health trusts to use to train their staff.