Covid Print Oxford was formed through the generosity of strangers, who volunteered to help 3D print, assemble, distribute, and fund face shields for frontline workers. 

Your kind donations enabled us to distribute, for free, 13,000 face shields to protect the lives of workers and patients alike in the following settings: GP surgeries, COVID research wards, COVID testing centres, pharmacies, care homes, schools, and more. This helped protect the lives and health of nurses, doctors, teachers, pharmacists, speech therapists, and other professionals in Oxfordshire and nearby counties.

As the urgency to donate face-shields in Oxfordshire diminished, we looked further afield. Our UK-based donations are still going to Wiltshire, Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire. But the need didn’t stop in the UK. Anticipating the world-wide spread of COVID-19, we sent batches of 50 face shields to orthopaedic centres and charities in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Ethiopia, Niger and Uganda.

You can find a map of our donations here: https://www.covidprintoxford.com

All the while, we were preparing to stop 3D-printing. Making PPE this way was only possible due to many volunteers running their printers for many hours for days at a time. Many printer owners lost sleep to keep production rates high. To professionalise our work, engineers from our biggest corporate partner, Diamond Light Source, adapted an open source design to make it perfect for mass-production: high on comfort, as eco-friendly as possible for PPE, and flat-packed for cost-effective distribution.

We have applied for a CE mark for distribution in the UK and are sending our new face shields in their thousands to 25 African countries, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico, where the virus is claiming many lives.

We still need to fundraise to buy face shields and to post them. If you can help us to spread the word, you’ll help us continue to save lives across the globe.

Donations go towards manufacture, distribution and certification. Our volunteers – mostly experienced managers, project managers, engineers and medics – give their time for free.

Thank you for your support – from Rob and our wonderful team of volunteers at CPO