Power of the needle: 4 women help UK docs needing scrubs

LONDON (AP) — They just wanted to help. But they created a movement.

Four women from London’s Hackney Wick neighbourhood responded to the coronavirus pandemic by organising volunteers who so far have churned out more than 3,800 sets of scrubs for health care workers after Britain’s National Health Service was unable to provide enough of the pajama-like garments.

More importantly, they helped organise a nation, putting together a template for making basic personal protection equipment, or PPE, with organisational ideas and a pattern for the scrubs so others could do the same.

Now some 70 “Scrub Hubs″ with more than 2,200 volunteers are busily sewing away from Scotland to Wales.

“Very quickly, we discovered that Hackney was not just the (only) place where PPE was needed,” said one organiser, Brooke Dennis, 33. “It was needed all across the land.’’

The story of how four women used social media to create and deliver desperately needed medical supplies around the UK began with a request from a single doctor: I need scrubs to do my job. Can anyone help?

That surprised charity worker Maya Ilany, 29.

The idea that the NHS might not have enough of something so basic startled her.

She googled the doctor. “I thought: It’s a joke,″ she recalled.

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