Our nation is running perilously short of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE). With the peak of COVID-19 infection still to come and the number of cases set to remain high for months, we must source the best PPE available for our health care professionals.

Without it, they cannot care for infected patients safely.

Without it, they may become ill and spread infection themselves.

If our doctors, nurses and paramedics become sick, they must self-isolate and right now we cannot do without them.

The University of Cambridge has strong links and academic collaborations with China, and particularly Nanjing, such as Engineering Professor Daping Chu. In collaboration with Professors Sadaf Farooqi and Toni Vidal Puig (Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science), our engineers, biomedical scientists and clinicians are working with suppliers and manufacturers in the UK and China to ensure we access high-quality PPE. 

We need funding urgently to acquire:

• Goggles (reusable or single)
• FFP2 and FFP3 masks (reusable or single-use) with additional filters for reusable
• Water repellent single-use IIR standard surgical masks
• Surgical gowns

We have already secured financial resources to purchase 80,000 sets of scrubs for staff to wear. If successful, our goal is to distribute PPE to support other hospitals in Cambridgeshire and the UK depending on our capacity to upscale.