The Volunteers Sewing 4,000+ Scrubs for U.K. Health Care Workers

Four women from London have responded to the coronavirus pandemic by organizing a volunteer movement that has so far sewn almost 4,000 sets of scrubs for British health care workers.

They decided to act when Britain's National Health Service ran short of protective gowns and and other forms of personal protection equipment (PPE).

Rather than keep the concept to themselves, they helped other volunteer groups to follow in their footsteps, creating a template that shared patterns for the scrubs and offered tips on how to recruit more people to the cause.

Within a week, 20 groups had formed. A week later, the number had jumped to 60.

Now some 70 "Scrub Hubs″ with more than 2,200 volunteers are busily sewing away across the country.

Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have struggled to obtain personal protective equipment, including face shields, gloves and masks, to help protect them from the virus as they work to save lives.

Simple cotton scrubs are in short supply as COVID-19 patients stretch hospital resources.

The British government has been strongly criticized for failing to provide enough PPE to frontline health care workers.

Scrub Hub's founders made contact during the early days of the crisis when they used WhatsApp message groups to ask if any health care workers in their local neighborhood needed help.

Designers, costume assistants, and other creative types with time on their hands because of the lockdown stepped forward to help, while crowdfunding paid for the materials.

Scrub Hub then went a step further, putting together an easy-to-follow open source document that showed others how to do what they had done.

That spawned similar groups.

Britain's news media have started reporting on Scrub Hub, seizing on it as a good news story at a time when there isn't much good news around - the country's coronavirus death toll as of Friday stood at more than 27,500.

But one of Scrub Hub's founders, Brooke Dennis, said it wasn't good news at all that volunteers were having to help fill the gap on an issue as fundamental as protective gear for hospital staff.

"It's a shame that we're still providing these for our doctors," said Dennis, who runs a textile studio called Make Town.

"But at the end of the day, they need it, we'll do it."

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