Two anaesthesiology residents at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, USA, who launched a non-profit dedicated to designing, manufacturing and donating high-quality emergency personal protective equipment for healthcare workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, have so far supplied more than 10,000 reusable face shields.
Jacqueline Boehme and Alexander Stone founded MasksOn.org to develop the reusable mask kit, a durable and sanitizable item of emergency personal protective equipment made by adapting full-face recreational snorkel masks to connect to bacterial/viral filters already used in hospitals.
With the help of volunteer engineers and technologists from organisations such as Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard University and Google, as well as significant financial support, the anesthesiology residents have been able to purchase the snorkel masks, manufacture filter adaptors, and donate the assembled kits to clinicians and healthcare facilities that lack approved personal protective.
Having already supplied more than 10,000, MasksOn.org aims to produce and donate 70,000+ mask kits to frontline healthcare professionals in intensive care units and emergency rooms across the USA. The organisation has raised more than $2 million of its $3 million target so far and is currently accepting donations via GoFundMe.
On launching MasksOn.org in April, Dr Stone said: “Frontline medical professionals caring for COVID-19 patients are at extremely high-risk of exposure. Intubation, extubation and other aerosolizing procedures put healthcare professionals directly in harm’s way. We need to do everything we can to keep them safe, so they can continue providing the care that so many need. We started MasksOn.org as a way to quickly and safely create and donate emergency PPE to those in the greatest need during this crisis.”
Image: MasksOn.org
