Frontline care workers will run out of personal protective equipment (PPE) “within days” unless the government organises emergency supplies, council leaders have said.
The warning from the Local Government Association (LGA) follows the delay of the government’s “Clipper” system, designed to be a central hub for distributing PPE. It could take at least another three weeks before the system was up and running, the LGA said, as it called for an “urgent guarantee that emergency supplies will reach them and their partners while they wait for the Clipper service to be fully operational”.
Councils and local areas each need access to millions of items of PPE each week, including masks, aprons and gloves, it said. Current shortages are “hampering efforts to combat the coronavirus”, it added.
