Two years on from the first lockdown, The Daily Telegraph asked staff at University College London Hospital to tell them their stories including Director of Procurement Pia Larsen.
‘I was truly mind-blown,’ she recalls. As the trust’s procurement director she had to source huge quantities of masks, gowns, gloves, ventilators, syringes, infusion pumps and much else besides.
She felt an ‘immense responsibility’ because staff would depend on her for the equipment to protect them from the disease. ‘It was a life and death matter. I felt it was my responsibility to keep safe every single clinician in the hospital.’
She and her team secured what they could from the NHS supply chain and the Government’s pandemic stockpile, but that was not nearly enough. They went to any supplier they knew with links to China. They approached suppliers of PPE to the construction industry. They had to think 'creatively and laterally’, she says.
It was a day-to-day race to keep up with demand even as their usual supply chains broke down. Instead of the 600 high-grade FFP3 protective masks the hospital’s critical-care department normally used each day, it suddenly needed 2,500. Instead of 500 gowns a day, it was using 2,500. She also had to contend with soaring prices. Suppliers were asking as much as £12 for gowns that normally cost £2, or £1 for 5p masks.
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Source: Daily Telegraph
Date: 14 March