Nissan Sunderland plant hits the half a million mark with PPE for frontline workers

Answering the call for support in creating PPE, a  57-strong team of staff volunteers at the Nissan Sunderland plant have manufactured half a million aprons in just over 3 months. The aprons have been supplied to more than 100 health care trusts and care homes across the North East region.

Alan Johnson, Vice President, Manufacturing said: “I’m extremely proud of the way the team at the plant answered the call to produce PPE for our front line workers.

“Producing more than half a million aprons in such a short period of time demonstrates the skill, ingenuity and dedication of our team at the plant.

Nissan began producing aprons in April this year following a request from the Royal College of Nursing and Unite for UK manufacturers to help with the unprecedented demand for PPE.

A team of staff volunteers took just eight days to design and build a process onsite to manufacture the plastic aprons.

The project was carried out in parallel to the plant’s activity to help supply visors to the NHS.

As part of that, a team of volunteers have created a parts processing line to sort thousands of individual visor parts and pack them into sets of 125 for shipping direct to the NHS, with more than 370,000 units distributed.