How It Started

Recognising the need to provide a local hub to centralise and co-ordinate efforts to provide vital Personal Protective Equipment to front line workers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Rebecca Brown, a York-based GP, and Sarah Ashton, an experienced seamstress and owner of Thimbelina of York brought together a community effort to deliver this.

It started with Sarah releasing a press article asking for donations of fabric. The response from our local community was overwhelming; through generous donations and together with an incredible team of volunteers, a community focused on protecting our frontline clinicians by making scrubs was formed.

It’s heartwarming to receive all the messages of support, and to hear of peoples motivations behind donating and volunteering, it is so clear how much for NHS means to so many people. We have also received many messaged from frontline clinicians, turning up to work to find the shelves bare of scrub, so we knew we needed to help and we needed to help quickly!

York scrubs now have a team of cutters, seamstresses, drivers, admin and many more to make it all run smoothly and they are so grateful for every one of them, all volunteering their time. We have established a system that works and as long as we don’t run out of supplies we can continue to help the NHS staff with their much needed scrubs.