University teams come together to ensure testing of PPE can keep up with demand

Staff from the University of Southampton's Medicine and Chemistry departments have been working around the clock to produce supplies of vital solutions used to ensure facemasks for healthcare workers are fitted safely.

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating an unprecedented demand for facemasks as part of the personal protective equipment for staff working on the frontline in hospitals and throughout the healthcare sector; this demand also extends to the solutions needed to test them.

Each FFP3 facemask used on the wards needs to be adjusted individually to the wearer’s face; the seal of each mask then needs to be checked by spraying a flavoured solution around it. If the wearer can taste the flavour whilst performing certain exercises (e.g., talking or bending to mimic the action of retrieving items), then the mask is not fitted correctly as droplets must have penetrated the seal.

In order to make sure their colleagues in local hospitals have enough testing solutions to keep up with demand, chemistry and medicine teams at the University came together in the university labs and in just over a week have produced the first batches of the bitter and sweet tasting solutions.

Professor Gill Reid, Head of Chemistry at the University of Southampton said “In the past week, our labs have transformed from teaching and research facilities to a full-scale production, testing and distribution facility. The team have carried out every phase of the process from bringing in the raw materials and equipment we need, making up batches of the solutions, sterilising, bottling, rigorous quality testing and labelling, then finally packing and distributing.”

“Our colleagues on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic are doing amazing work and we are keen to do our bit to help them stay healthy and keep caring for the people who need their support.”

The team are now looking at options that are available to scale-up the amount of solution they are able to produce in their labs, and with the University Hospital Southampton are talking to local hospitals to establish their requirements and distribution logistics.

They have also produced standard operating procedures for the production and testing of both solutions, and these will be made accessible open-source next week so that institutions around the country will have the information they need to step in to make sure enough supplies can be produced nationally.