Seaford and Bishopstone Neighbourhood Watch group helped other volunteers in the community form RxScrubs, also loving known as Sussex Sewers. The central group was created in just 3 weeks and together have built an amazing infrastructure to effectively build a huge factory of 1,200 volunteers, sewing scrubs and other key worker necessities for frontline staff everywhere.
They have created a vast amount of teams with team leaders in a short space of time. The donation of a church hall really helped the logistics as legends who prepare the orders for delivery. All this from fundraising so no-one needs to pay when they order 2,400 masks for the Eastbourne bin men for example, or when they make children's gowns for the NHS. Two thousand sets of scrubs created for the hospital was no problem as these amazing people make that happen in days! In other great news someone had a contact and hey presto the Rolls Royce factor is cutting patterns so the sewers work is easier to just run the scrubs up. This helps ensure it is the quality the NHS needs.
Any challenges?
Initially, the sheer charity building that would take about a year was compressed into 10 days. People lost sleep, had meltdowns, tears from the sheer pressure of doing this, but do it they did!
Then they worried that they would have all this fabric and lovely keen volunteers but low numbers of orders which is when the NW coordinator contacted them.
She is an End of Life Care Lead for the NHS training arms Health Education England for Kent. She had spotted from their Facebook page they seemed more concentrated on the Eastbourne Brighton side of the patch, and she is local to the Conquest in Hastings.
She alerted all her hospice, hospitals, and care home contacts she had worked with over the 4 years to improve End of Life Care across all the area they cover and all the CCGs which can cascade info to GPs surgeries and other community services. She believe orders started rolling in and all these amazing people are happily sewing, organising, driving, packing and crocheting.