New manufacturing initiatives tackle COVID-19 face mask shortages

One company that is responding to the appeal for more masks is Fath Components Ltd, a member company of the Germany-based Fath Group, is now able to supply premium quality face masks from stock from both its UK warehouse and from the Group’s German production and distribution facility.

A medium-sized corporate group specialised in the development, manufacture and distribution of system components, Fath Components is also gearing up to manufacture face masks at its main plant in Spalt, to the east of Stuttgart.

“For some weeks now the management team at our plant in Germany has been striving to establish a new production facility to meet anticipated demand for face masks,” said Fath UK managing director David Hayes. According to the company, once the new line is fully operational, it will be able to produce and dispatch 50,000 masks a day.

Since 27 April, German citizens are required to wear masks when in a public place. Fath says it will make “significant numbers” of Type FFP2 face masks available to health service providers, institutions and care homes at cost-price, with any additional production then retailing direct to the general public via its website and established network of approved distributors.

Fath Group manufactures over 23,000 different and is used to swiftly taking new designs from concept to finished items. “But in this case the manufacturing of new FFP2 masks has also required a whole new production facility to be designed and commissioned in record time,” said Hayes.

And in Sweden, Scanfill AB, a producer of sustainable packaging material, and Plast Petter AB, a specialist manufacturer of, among other things, office products, are collaborating on the manufacture of protective face shields.

Scanfill AB, part of the family-owned Polykemi Group, manufactures A-PET film that is delivered on roll and then cut and assembled to protective face shields by Plast Petter. Together, the companies will manufacture up to 500,000 protective face shields for Swedish hospitals and elderly care per week.

“We have rebuilt our machines to achieve the high quality required by Swedish healthcare and we can now produce a plastic foil that is thinner than we have ever done before,” said Oscar Hugoson, Scanfill's executive vice president Oscar Hugoson.

Producing face masks offers an economic opportunity for the two companies, as well. As a result of the pandemic, large parts of the staff at Scanfill had been furloughed, but thanks to the new collaboration, all 15 Scanfill employees have returned to their jobs.

In addition, staff will be relocated from Polykemi to Scanfill, which is ‘very good news for the production in Ystad, for our employees and for the Polykemi Group’, said Hugoson. Polykemi AB, with its subsidiaries Rondo Plast AB and Scanfill AB, is the largest private employer in southeastern Skåne in Sweden.

The collaboration between Scanfill and Plast Petter, say the companies, may well be the beginning of a longer collaboration.

“Scanfill is a reliable supplier that delivers materials of a high quality. I truly believe that this is a collaboration that can grow in the future when this storm has subsided,” said Fredrik Ahlström, CEO of Plast Petter AB.

In a third initiative, again in the UK, engineers at the University of Nottingham have designed a PPE face shield with CE approval that they are 3D printing at scale for healthcare workers to use in the fight against COVID-19.

Using the latest in Additive Manufacturing  technology and materials at the University’s Centre for Additive Manufacturing, and working with external collaborators, the team will deliver 5,000 of the face shields to Nottingham’s NHS and community healthcare workers. Building on an open-source design of headband originally from HP, the team in the Faculty of Engineering made modifications to ensure the face shield could pass a regulatory test by BSI, the UK’s national standards body, to meet its essential health and safety requirements which ensures the highest level of protection is provided.

This equipment is regulated as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). It is specifically designed as a barrier against ‘harmful biological agents’. In the UK and EU, these products currently need to comply with the European PPE regulation and have a CE marking on their packaging.

The face shields successfully passed the BSI tests and are CE approved for use as part of PPE for healthcare workers’ protection against COVID-19 in both hospital and community environments. They are provided in packs to the NHS, with five replacement visors per face shield as well as instructions for use. The team have made the design and its accompanying documents ‘open-source’ to enable other manufacturers to produce the face shields – however, manufacturers will need to submit their product for testing to the BSI to obtain their own CE certification. 

In the current circumstances, healthcare workers and the general public alike are seeking to find the best protection possible against the airborne coronavirus disease Covid-19. Many people will be looking to buy them online or elsewhere. But it is important to know if a specific piece of equipment has been designed for its intended purpose, as not all protection is created equal.

The Global Medical Device Nomenclature (GMDN) Agency has provided the healthcare world with specific generic descriptions concerning all medical products for nearly 20 years and provides manufacturers and regulators a standard way of describing products and their intended purpose.

It oversees the naming and categorising convention for all medical devices used in much of the world. It is not a regulatory agency, although it works in conjunction with medical device regulator, nor does it test or certify medical equipment.

Regarding face masks, the Agency has compiled a number of terms, with descriptions that help standardise the name of products and group products together that carry out the same function. This helps the management and supply of all the products needed, especially important in these challenging times.

The Agency has warned that people should be wary of face masks being sold online. A reliable supplier will have a long-established track record of supplying medical equipment and will be able to provide the CE marking information and instruction for use. Ideally, they will include the GMDN too.