LONDON, April 26 (Xinhua) -- Cai Linna, a Chinese descendant, is a member of High Wycombe community district nurse team at Buckinghamshire NHS Trust. In an email earlier this week to the China Construction Bank (CCB) London Branch, she and her colleagues expressed their profound gratitude for the bank's donation of personal protective equipment (PPE) amid the novel coronavirus crisis.
The trust has received a package of 2,000 face masks and 40 medical coveralls from CCB London Branch.
"Thank you and China Construction Bank very much for your donation. We are so appreciated what you did for us," said Cai in the email.
"At present, we have to visit the community every day, but there is hardly any PPE for us. We only wear surgical masks while visiting patients with symptoms," said Cai in another email to the CCB staff in late March.
Despite their own shortage, the trust decided to share the PPE from CCB London Branch with the local community, especially care homes hit by the lack of the equipment.
"At the moment that NHS (National Health Service) is very short of the PPE, I will drop off those coveralls to Stoke Mandeville Hospital, as the ICU staff need them more, and I am going to donate some of the masks to the care home, where the staff work without any protection," said Cai.
In a picture she shared in the email, two staff of the care home holding some boxes of face masks, with a big smile on their faces.
Amid growing concern over the PPE shortage for the frontline medical staff and other key workers in Britain, CCB London Branch has joined the efforts from all walks of life across the country to source PPE to hospitals, care homes and universities.
"The PPE delivered to the trust were originally sent from China, shared by our head office and brother branches there," Wu Hao, deputy head of financial institutions at CCB London, told Xinhua.
"We have received a total of 400 protective goggles from our brother branches in China, of which 300 have been donated to hospitals in London," said Wu, taking protective goggles for example.
CCB London Branch has donated more than 30,000 PPE items -- more than half of the PPE they have received -- to local hospitals, care homes and universities in Britain.
In a photograph shared by a staff member at the University Hospital Lewisham in London, two large boxes of PPE from CCB London Branch were surrounded by the ICU team of the hospital, with one doctor displaying protective goggles and medical coveralls in his hands while others all giving thumbs-ups.
Last month, the CCB purchased 10 ventilators in Shanghai, China and planed to donate them to the British government. But the reduction of direct flights due to COVID-19 pandemic had made it difficult to ship them to London.
The CCB then sent the ventilators to their Shandong Branch about 540 miles way in east China's Shandong province, where they were finally brought to London by a group of Chinese medical workers sent by the province to Britain, and donated to the British government. Enditem
