A global pandemic. 16,000 masks required every day to keep our crews safe. Challenge accepted.
“The most important thing for me was keeping our colleagues – who are really our friends and family – safe. And that meant making sure we didn’t run out of PPE.”
Steve Farnsworth has been General Manager of Fleet Services and Logistics at EMAS for 14 years. And while he has faced some challenging winters in the NHS over the years, never before had he and his team been tested to the absolute limits as they were in the first few months of COVID-19.
He said: “I’m an avid watcher of the news and although I saw what was happening in China, it looked like they had a grip on it, so before March it never crossed my mind that it would reach the scale it has done, and so quickly.”
Like many people, life at home continued as normal for Steve other than buying a couple of extra tins while out shopping in case of a lockdown.
But at work he started to see equipment supply chains suddenly become really busy and conversations became more tense as the pandemic began to hit the UK.
Before he knew it, Steve and his management team were working 16-18 hour days, 7 days a week, to source, receive and distribute vital PPE to frontline colleagues to keep them safe.
And although Steve could have worked from home because his two children, aged 6 and 8 were at school, and his wife was still working as a head teacher, he says he wanted to make sure he was leading from the front and showing it was safe by being in work every day.
“We were really in the thick of it. It was tense and hectic, but it was also very focused and really rewarding making sure our colleagues would be safe. Seeing news of staff in other trusts who had passed away from COVID really brought home the importance of what we were doing.
“We were getting rumblings that there wasn’t PPE on some vehicles, so we introduced PPE2V – PPE to vehicles. This was a real shift in tradition from having boxes on stations, to delivering PPE directly to ambulances.
“We also split the boxes of masks up to make sure they went further, and worked on a ‘just in time’ basis so that everyone had the PPE that they needed, when they needed it.”