The Hand Sanitiser Australia Project

As the world, including Australia, recognised the emerging Covid-19 pandemic around mid-March 2020, private health care organisations quickly realised that they were ill equipped to safely manage clinical services with woefully inadequate supplies of PPE and hand sanitiser. Without significant local manufacture and the redistribution of PPE to other nations, we faced a dire situation in trying to maintain health services across the country.

It was obvious that without market action, health services would not be able to continue to manage the care of especially vulnerable patients and placed staff health at risk also.

‘Practice Managers Network’ Facebook group mobilises to form project team

A group of leaders from the Facebook group ‘Practice Managers Network’ quickly mobilised, implementing a project to ensure supply of medical grade hand sanitiser for medical practices around the country — including regional, rural and remote locations. The ‘Hand Sanitiser Australia Project’ was born.

What the team noted was that significant price gouging of all PPE supplies was evident, as well as market flooding of poor quality, and non-compliant product. In an effort to support the private health care industry, this group sought to provide high quality supplies at the lowest possible cost.

Anna Davidson, a group member, took up contact with Riwka Hagen, the administrator of the group, and Matt Gilchrist, another active group member.

Anna’s professional networks included chemical manufacturers and she felt confident that she could encourage them to change their manufacturing focus and start producing hand sanitiser. She secured supply of the key ingredient — ethanol — and production commenced soon after.

At the same time, Riwka communicated with the Facebook group to gather information from practices that needed hand sanitiser supplies, and Matt started working on the challenges related to distribution of the highly flammable supplies. John Roberts later joined the team in providing further project management support and a key communicator between the project team and the manufacturers.

There were many risks and challenges associated with this project, including:

• The team members developing a project within a matter of days, when they were not well acquainted at the outset. In fact, the team members are from Queensland, NSW and Victoria!

• The possibility that we would not be able to secure any part of the key requirements.

• Reputational risks associated with making promises to practices that may not be achieved.

• Balancing supply and demand needs.

• Securing transport pathways to deliver the hand sanitiser.

• Uncertainty around how the COVID-19 pandemic would play out in Australia, hence product demand was also uncertain.

The team sought to obtain governmental financial support to ensure practices would have ongoing access to supplies, however many hours of work and submissions were essentially ineffective.

‘Hand Sanitiser Australia Project’ team secrets to success

The ‘Hand Sanitiser Australia Project’ team, working together with key manufacturers Manildra, WaterTest Systems and Mera Chemicals, was able to supply over 3500 units of initially 5L containers, and later, larger volumes to small and large medical services, including GPs, specialists, allied health, pharmacies, community health and other services. From the time of concept (mid-March) to shipping the first supplies was a couple of weeks, which is an incredible achievement in innovation and agility.

Significant media interest in this project resulted in a number of TV and radio interviews as well as news articles.

The secrets to success included:

• Alignment of mindset of the organising team— each team member brought a different skill set and network, but a similar can-do approach

• The trust developed within the Facebook ‘Practice Managers Network’. When the project team put the concept to the group members, there was incredible support and commitment to participate.

• Recognition that perfection was not required. In fact, there were many stages where the next actions were unclear or undefined, and systems were developed quickly and improved as the project rolled out.

• High dependence on video conferencing as the main communication between the team members.

As the first COVID-19 wave was quite successfully managed in Australia, it became evident that the clinical severity was thankfully lower than originally feared. This brought its own challenges for the manufacturing team in revising down the estimated product volume requirements.

Now, as we face second and further outbreaks and we are without an effective vaccine, the risks of further flare ups with increased demand for PPE may yet pose the next challenge.

The ‘Hand Sanitiser Australia Project’ team is now in hiatus—but stands ready to assist should the next pandemic wave require another mammoth response to protect health workers and patients.