WI mission of mercy

605 sets of scrubs have been made by Dovestone WI

A volunteer army of devoted helpers have reached out to a hospital in desperate need of medical aid to combat the coronavirus.

In under two weeeks, the stalwarts from Dovestone WI blasted a request for 500 surgical scrub gowns by making a total of 605 from cotton bedding donated by their kind hearted community.

And as an added extra, they handcrafted scrub bags to accompany the gowns for front line teams at Wigan’s Royal Albert Infirmary.

Jessica Moreland, Dovestone WIs President, was asked to help the daunting task by a local Delph doctor.

She said: “In all, a task force of more than 40 women across Greater Manchester including a team of cutter and sewing bees worked in perfect sync with each other.

“I was running a command centre from my car, while dangling chains of post-it notes with jobs on them. We worked across social medía and lots of doorsteps and garden walls with minimum to no human contact throughout. 

“A huge  thank you to everyone - our members, ladies in the wider community, their husbands, it’s been such an awesome team.” 

And she reserved special thanks for committee member, Michelle Petruzzelli, who transformed her garage into a ‘Fabric Distribution Warehouse’ for this job.

“Having this facility has made this mission so much easier. And also our super sonic secretary, Janet Mills, who kept our community support group of volunteers coordinated, with shopping and prescription collections, while this was going on.

“We had terrific support From the Elastic company that donated dozens of boxes of elastic for the cuffs, Drifthill Home for producing rolls and rolls of bias tape for the collars and Ibex Rope Company who donated the drawstring cords for the scrub bags.”

And she added: "Theres going to be some pretty funky looking medical staff in their scrub gowns.

“We've got unicorns and UFO’s, pirates and pigs, dinosaurs and dogs, feathers and flowers, polka dots and princesses, spiderman and snowflakes....and much, much more!”

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