The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services says it requested 500,000 each of N95 masks, gowns, gloves, face shields and coveralls from the federal stockpile to help health care workers be properly protected while treating patients. As of Sunday, all amounts of that PPE, or personal protective equipment, are less than requested.
That’s why health care systems like UNC Health have put out calls for any donations of unopened medical supplies. In the last few weeks, many of UNC’s professional schools, departments and organizations have made substantial efforts to help.
One example is UNC’s Adams School of Dentistry, which decided to donate 99 percent of its PPE after limiting its clinical operations. Dean Scott De Rossi said the school gave approximately 366,000 gloves, 105,000 earloop masks, 1,300 face shields, 600 canisters of disinfectant and other supplies to the UNC Health system.
“Sending our front line healthcare workers in to manage patients right now without appropriate PPE would be analogous to sending a soldier into battle with a bb gun,” De Rossi said. “It’s not fair to them and potentially dangerous for their patients and co-workers.”
In addition to the donation, De Rossi said the Adams School has a resource being used in an innovative way to help preserve and reuse the crucial N95 masks workers use when treating COVID-19 patients.
“We have the largest ethylene oxide gas sterilizer in the state, which is used to sterilize certain dental instruments related to root canals,” the dean described. “It’s able to use gas to decontaminate masks without degrading any of its filter ability or damaging any of the rubber or metal surrounding that makes up an N95 mask.”
De Rossi said the sterilizer has the capacity to clean 1,000 masks every 24 hours and the school is offering to help other hospitals across the state, asking them to send their N95 masks to be routinely sterilized.
The dentistry school isn’t the only professional school that’s offered up its resources. The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy also recently made a donation of 100 N95 masks, 250 procedure masks and nasal swabs, which are largely from labs done for research and class exercises.
Wendy Cox is the Associate Dean for Professional Education at the Eshelman School. She said the school wanted to be a part of any effort to help its partners and colleagues at UNC and around the state.
But beyond that, she said the patients’ health and safety were also a driving factor.
“Everything we do begins and ends with a patient in mind,” said Cox. “When we received this call to collect any type of PPE we had, we were happy to find any extra we had and to send it over. We wanted to contribute and do anything we [could] to help our colleagues.”
Even the Morehead Planetarium got involved. Despite not being directly connected to health care, Director Tom Boyette said UNC Health is a partner in putting on the North Carolina Science Festival, which added fuel to the fire of donating. He described it as an “easy decision” and said the planetarium donated nearly all of its gloves in stock, which are used for various activities and experiments during the academic year and summer programming.
“Every summer we have about 5,000 K-12 children in summer science camps,” Boyette said. “If you think about them alone, if each of them has one pair of gloves, that’s 10,000 gloves. I was worried the gloves were kid-sized, but actually they were adult sizes of small, medium and large, so it was a good collection.”
Similarly to his colleagues, Boyette also voiced the importance of getting health care workers any PPE possible to help make sure they’re properly equipped to continue helping those sick with the coronavirus.
“To hear they don’t have all the equipment they need,” he said, “it’s hard to hear. If there’s something we can do, a tangible action, we absolutely should do it. I feel like we’re all on the same team, in the same family, and of course you want your teammates to have everything they need to [safely] do what they’re asked to do.”
UNC Health recently shared a statement to provide an update on the donations and to thank the community for its help so far.
“We are extremely grateful for the outpouring of donations to UNC Health from schools, businesses, community organizations and individuals,” said Christian Lawson, director of emergency services at UNC Health. “We’ve been working hard to secure personal protective equipment from various sources, and these donations have been very helpful.”
In Orange County, the UNC Wellness Center at Meadowmont in Chapel Hill is a designated drop off spot for any donations. Other locations include UNC Health Learning Street in Morrisville, UNC Wellness Center in Cary and Rex Wellness Center in Raleigh.
For a full list of medical supplies UNC Health and WakeMed are seeking and a list of times to drop off donations at various locations, visit UNC Health’s donation web page.
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