- Have a great personal connection to a massive factory in mainland China that ships millions of CE-approved masks and examination gloves to Europe every day. It’s late March, and our lovely guy there, let’s call him Jerry, is bombarding us with spreadsheets and Skype messages and calls every day, begging us to ask him for more information about what he can provide, and get him in contact with buyers here in the UK. It’s a learning-curve and a half, finding out what a KN 95 is and whether it’s a Type II or IIIR face mask, or a respirator mask.
- Respond quickly to a government shout-out to UK businesses to tell them what we’ve got and whether it complies with their specifications. Get a standard reply with detailed specs from the ‘Government Commercial Function’ about what they need. Realise this is some incarnation of the Government Commercial Department that you, yourself, used to work for, years ago. Get in touch with ex-colleagues to see if they can find a living human being to speak to. They are keen to help.
- Nobody answers them.
- Spend hours on Skype, trying to match up the CE certificates with the products Jerry is telling you about. Translated (mostly) into English. Amazing. Learn fast about the way you can’t spend time explaining to Jerry how it’s impossible to find a single human being to talk to about what they might be able to buy. Jerry doesn’t want to hear that, just the same as he doesn’t want to hear that he’s put something incorrect on the spreadsheet. Hand the phone to your (Pakistani) husband, the one who made the connection with Jerry five years ago when he visited FuJian to start up a diaper-manufacturing business with them (before they switched to making face masks). That’s the time when he took tea with the Chairman of the company and was taken out for dinner by Jerry’s family, and they started calling each other ‘Brother’. (I’m ‘Sister-in-Law’ in the emails and Skype messages). Husband figures out an elegant way to smoothe over the impasse.
- Spend a week doing something, anything, inhaling Netflix or Now TV seasons of documentaries about serial murderers or The Newsroom, rather than think about face masks and CE certificates and FOB prices, because it’s just dawned on you that your entire way of life has been changed by the Coronavirus, not just for the lockdown but, really, in all honesty, for ever.
- Read about health workers dying for lack of PPE, hear the Health Secretary tick the rest of them off for using too much of it at once, hear still more about how badly everyone wants the stuff Jerry is manufacturing, yet with no means of connecting him to the people buying it, and despair.
- Read all the stories about PPE tsars being appointed, about Turkish consignments of surgical gowns arriving on Sunday, (then not arriving), about how none of the businesses, like ours, that responded to the call-out, have heard anything. Watch a Labour MP ask us to contact her so she can question the government about it, and see what happens.
- Three days later, finally get something back from the government asking us to upload information about our offering. We’re told to expect it to take up to two weeks to hear back from them.
- Hear about an NHS Trust in Devon begging for something to cover themselves with, anything, boiler suits, anything at all, no need for CE-approved equipment. Get onto a website that charges over £1000 to let you into the detail of tenders like those. Get a phone call from a nice guy in Aberdeen (from the expensive website) who puts you on to the government (free) tender website, and find another local authority asking for PPE for social care homes. A real live human being’s name to email. Ping him over the stuff you uploaded onto the government website and the next day get an email from another real live human being thanking us for the information and saying they’ll be in touch. So that’s progress, in a way.
- It’s almost May, and nobody who’s in a position to make an order has actually come back to us yet, and the factories in China that Jerry is connected to are still ready to make the PPE and air freight it over to us within 10 days or less from the date of the order. They’ve been sending stuff to Italy the whole time we’ve been getting pretty much nowhere.
It might be that we are particularly inept or inexperienced, and that’s OK, we only wanted to help our beleaguered and brave NHS and social care workers have protective equipment that should have been stockpiled ready for something like this. But all the evidence is showing that well-experienced players in this field, the NHS Supply Chain, are just as frustrated by long-winded bureaucratic processes and the idea that you can pay someone 30 days after delivery for millions of pieces of kit. It’s a worldwide pandemic, the materials are getting in short supply, and they buy the materials to make the stuff once they get the order, but they want the purchaser in Europe to cover them for that initial investment. That’s what happens in the real world. I’m sure, one way or another, the equipment will get ordered and made and delivered, and worn, and lives will be saved. But what a cost in the meantime, what a terrible cost.
Izzy Brown 