Schools create visors for health care workers

In response to Covid-19 schools in County Durham have been creating visors for healthcare workers.

South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said they wanted to say “a massive thank you” to the staff and students at Sedgefield Community College after they created in the region of 500 visors for workers in the area.

The visors have been distributed to hospitals, critical care units, community centre care departments and care homes.

Keith Rowell at the school told us how the idea came from a discussion around the need for eye protection. ‘After a discussion the school donated their eye protection from the Science and D&T departments to our local heath care centre. Then there was a social media post from a school in the south who were trying to create visors, but over engineered their design’

‘I wanted something easier to dismantle for recycling purposes, something that was easy to manufacture using the school’s ICT especially our laser cutter and possibly the 3D printers, and which used the least amount of different materials.’

Keith then spoke to County Durham and Darlington NHS health care trust about the design and went on to make the first 50 ‘The students who are on our key worker supervision program got involved when they saw what I was doing. Now the message has got out many D&T departments are doing the same, using their materials and facilities to make various styles of face shields. We are not in this alone!’

‘So far, we have donated approximately 550 visors and the requests are still coming in. We want to continue to help our community during this difficult time.’

As well as helping the community the school are minimising waste as the materials used to make the visors came from would be student projects for the summer term. To further reduce waste the school are also using offcuts to manufacture mask elastic clips that remove the pressure from the ears when wearing a visor.

Keith and the school are continuing to make the visors with additional materials, ‘we ordered more materials from Technology Supplies who have been really supportive of us and other D&T departments who are trying to do their bit. This has only been possible thanks to Laidlaw Schools Trust, who released some funds to help.’

Seaham School have also been involved in making the visors and we’re very pleased to see a photo of some theatre staff from Sunderland Royal Hospital putting their equipment to good use.