Column: My Chesterfield community care firm has gone to great lengths to get face masks for front line staff

Millennium Homecare Services Ltd is a domiciliary care company supporting mainly elderly people in their own homes.

We are regulated by the Care Quality Commission and Derbyshire County Council.

We recruit community workers for their empathy, dedication, willingness to learn and drive to always go above and beyond for each individual service user, maintaining a person-centred approach to caring and supporting our loved ones while remaining in their own environment, surrounded by years of memories and possessions.

It would be fantastic if we could raise as much praise and acknowledgement for our community care workers.

The front line staff who work for Millennium have always been considered to be the main driving force of our team.

Our office staff are the cogs that organise, structure, build safe working conditions and maintain communication from front line to a multidisciplinary workforce in the provision of community care.

One cannot work without the other.

Coronavirus, as we all know, is an unprecedented virus that is creating havoc on a global scale.

While the rest of the UK was stockpiling loo rolls, Millennium was panic buying gloves and aprons, and for this approach I am thankful.

As time has progressed and the virus has ‘found its feet’ there’s been a lot of change around personal protective equipment (PPE) requirements.

Sometimes changes have been announced within a 48-hour period, again creating additional panic buying.

Fluid repellent masks have been earmarked as initially being required for symptomatic or confirmed Covid-19 cases only – alongside gloves, aprons and eye protection.

However, under new guidelines issued on April 15, it is now a requirement that all people providing personal care – where a two-metre distance cannot be maintained – wear a fluid repellent mask.

Resources were getting lower by the week.

I spent numerous hours to attempt to source surgical face masks at a sustainable cost.

This increased demand for PPE has not been budgeted for.

It was time to put our thinking caps on and become productive in order for us to meet the guidelines and also to protect the staff who are important to us.

I met Kate Stephenson-Ball, director of Guvnor Gear dance wear, about six years ago when I approached her for creating outfits for competitions.

Kate is known for her immense skills behind the sewing machine by dance studios far and wide, creating magnificent creations to compliment dance artists shows.

Kate was my first port of call to ask if she could produce approximately 2,000 surgical style face masks.

On agreement a prototype mask was made.

The nose strip was proving to be difficult to get, with a two-week delay on delivery, so we’ve created and shaped these from copper wire that we had laying around.

The masks in this present condition would not offer any protection against Covid-19.

Initially our intention was just to offer peace of mind and a reminder to not touch the face (saving the FFP2 masks we have for suspected or confirmed cases).

However, my partner Mark came up with the idea of proofing the masks using a waterproof based solution.

Although this is proving to be time consuming as all 2,000 masks are used only once, collected back in, washed, dried and reissued on a weekly basis, Millennium is happy that all our front line workers now have an affordable fluid resistant mask for every care call they provide.