Category: News

24th April 2020

We had approval from Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust today for the latest version of CoVisor face shields with a ‘half hat’ top piece. This approval also covers Cornwall Partnership NHS Trust and so we will be donating a further 710 units that Cornwall NHS Procurement will distribute.

Yesterday we send 170 visors to the Royal Free Hospital ICU in response to an urgent Tweet.

Welcome to the amazing Karen who has joined the CoVisor Team, taking on operations.

Thank you again to Jowan and Alcwyn for all their behind the scenes web & tech help over the last few weeks.

Verity & Kelly with CoVisors while they scan urgent cardiac patients for Treliske in the Community.

It has been a pretty intense first two weeks, especially for Dufort team at the factory. While production is not where we imagined, we have manufactured and distributed over 5,200 CoVisor face shields. From donating to the maternity wing at Treliske to supplying at-cost to undertakers, we have supplied face shields for use at over 70 organisations across Cornwall and the UK. They are being used in Critical care, in ambulances, in minor injuries, by carers, dentists, specialist nurses, in surgeries and by doctors visiting people’s homes.

CoVisor has now been approved by some NHS Trusts for their use and an Ambulance Service Trust has said it is their face shield of choice as it is comfortable and easy to clean for reuse. Our original aim of being reusable is becoming an important feature, allowing relatively small volumes to meet the demand with very little outlay compared to very high volumes needed for single use visors.

Thank you Francis Dufort, the main man behind it all. Thank you Shawn Brown, Louis, Alex, Elliot, Jack, Colin, Kim and everyone else at the factory. Thank you Linden at Design2Create, Gavin & Martin, City Sprint (and Kev), Phil Penna, Rosa, Chris, Esme & girls. Thank you Helpful Engineering Team, Jayne Kirkham, Katherine Lewis, Kingdom & Sparrow, Eleanor and everyone else that has given so much time.

Thank you to all of you who have donated to our Crowdfunder, it would not have been possible without you.

Also over the last two weeks we have been able to donate 500 disposable gowns and nearly 4,000 disposable face masks to healthcare settings in Cornwall including Treliske, St. Austell hospital, Newquay Hospital, Falmouth Hospital, all the Helston surgeries, Cornwall’s out of hours GP service and many more surgeries.

There have been quite a few challenges – managing production with a compressor failing and then a CNC machine breaking and a replacement being setup in parallel to the product development and new tooling to implement feedback from users and little improvements to CoVisor version 1.2 which is now super flexible, making assembly even easier for users.

We are currently working on securing new clear screen material supplies that we can purchase by the tonne and also working towards CE marking for CoVisor to meet BSEN166 as Cat. II PPE. Achieving this will allow us to continue providing CoVisor face shields in the short term, as well as long term if a need remains domestically or internationally.

A slight distraction from face shields, but Friday morning was upsetting and rewarding in equal measure. We distributed 3,500 masks that we were able to donate thanks to your support. Volunteer Cornwall’s ‘Cornwall PPE’ project managed the allocations and delivery split between Phil Penna and Cornwall 4×4 team.

It was so rewarding being able to provide supplies to NHS staff in need, the day they need it, but it also brought home the question of how was I here, loading boxes of masks I had ordered a month ago from China into the back of Land Rover to deliver to St Austell Hospital, Newquay Hospital, Falmouth Hospital along with GPs surgeries around the county? A big thank you to Carrie, the agent I deal with in China and UPS for actually getting it Falmouth. Sorry to Esme for the stress I caused sticking several thousand pounds on my credit card in early March without any idea how I was going to pay it off.

Also on Good Friday we successfully received our pallet of 750m of clear material for face shield screens and got 500 CoVisors delivered to Chris McIntyre in Newcastle upon Tyne to help their #PPE4NE project of donating PPE. We were able to provide them better face shields, faster and cheaper than they could make them themselves. It was great to see photos of it being received by NHS staff there the next day.

For me, the weekend has been non-stop phone calls and 14 hour days in front of screens, working with Jowan to get an ordering system up and running, with Alcwyn to move and rebuild our website, processing orders and annoying Shawn while he works on building relationships with more injection moulding companies to increase production and Francis who has been on a mission designing the next CoVisor version.

Thank you mostly to everyone on the production team who have kept the machines running for 3 out of the 4 days of Easter.

Please get in touch if your healthcare organisation needs face shields supplying just email

We are four days in and have fulfilled orders for over 2,200 CoVisors.

Today it is thank you to Chaz, the transport genius who has managed to get a pallet of materials collected in Newcastle and will have it here at 0630 in the morning (Good Friday).

Thank you to Dylan at Longshores for donating machining time to make our next injection moulding tool, that will hopefully allow us to more than double our production towards the end of next week.

We’ve reached our initial funding target of £7500! Thank you so much to everyone who’s supported so far. You’re all amazing and helping us to support our incredible NHS and care staff!

We’ve set a further stretch target of £15,000 that will enable us to increase our manufacturing volumes and ship even more face shields out to healthcare workers in Cornwall and further afield. Once we’ve met Cornwall’s needs we are going to donate additional stock to The NEAD who are the organisation distributing PPE donations to the country as a whole.

We’ve also had requests from our NHS contacts in Cornwall for other essential protective equipment, so we’re also going to use some of your donations to supply additional kit including protective gowns, which we’re able to source at a crazily good price through an international shipping agent. Thank you so much for helping us to use our skills to make a difference for those battling COVID-19 on the frontline.

Big love,

Sam, Shawn & Francis

Firstly, a thank you to everyone that has to wear a visor for what they are doing. I am humbled when I look at the number of visors in use and what is happening.

Secondly, thank you to everyone who has supported our project to get it this far this fast.

It has been another day of non-stop logistics, sourcing and solving. A record 6.5hrs of calls and video calls logged on my mobile, plus we discovered Good Friday, Easter and bank holiday Monday have suddenly loomed out of the future to stop much of the pallet network for our materials – so it may be a friend with a van and a lot of miles.

The team at Dufort packed and dispatched almost 800 visors, including 8 bought by a funeral director, 50 donated to Maternity at Treliske and an urgent request at lunchtime from Treliske Critical Care Unit for 100 units, which were packed and donated by this afternoon and are in use this evening. Thanks again CitySprint and to John for the Treliske trip.

Helpful Engineering, the open source medical equipment organisation we work with, asked if we could look at ramping up production volumes for the UK and in line with our stretch target, Shawn is now going to be working on ways to increase our manufacturing capacity to a nationally significant level.

Feedback from visors received today:
“The visors turned up today and were immediately used as we speak on a callout, thank you so very much for the speed in which these were ordered and delivered, it has helped in restoring confidence in my staff when dealing with difficult circumstances as you can all appreciate.”

“Some very appreciative and grateful staff at Treliske send big thanks to you and promise to review / photo.”