By Ciarán Sunderland
The University of Limerick (UL) will produce over 100,000 face visors for medical staff treating patients during the Covid-19 outbreak.
A research and design unit set about the project after a request from Professor Paul Burke, Chief Academic Officer at UL Hospitals Group and Vice Dean of Health Sciences at UL.
The Rapid Innovation Unit at UL works with local companies to make 5,000 masks a day and has dispatched the first batch already to University Hospital Limerick.
The project was a collaboration between the University of Limerick and UL Hospitals Group and the design will help to protect the health of front line staff and increase treatment capacities in the hospital system.
“There has been a phenomenal collaborative effort to deliver these solutions in a very short timeframe,” explained Professor Leonard O’Sullivan, of UL’s School of Design and the Health Research Institute based at UL.
Professor O’Sullivan noted that brothers Aidan and Kevin O’Sullivan, research fellows at UL, had “pulled out all the stops to lead the team to deliver these rapid response solutions for the hospital”.
