Appeal for moisturisers and lip balms for NHS workers in need

Energie Fitness gym responds to a call for help from Milton Keynes based NHS staff who are in desperate need of skin care products.

With many fund raisers and famous national campaigns to raise funds for NHS charities – like Capt Tom Moore’s walk of 100 lengths of his garden that went viral and raised millions of pounds. It might come as a surprise that here in Milton Keynes we can do something very simple to make a huge difference to the medics on the front line in our area.

Rob Francis, owner of Kiln Farm based Energie Fitness Gym explains, “One of our members who is a senior nurse, managing over 100 nurses delivering specialist dialysis care across Milton Keynes and Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, came to us to see if we could help support her and her team. Debs Grove explained to us that because our front-line nurses and doctors now spend long hours every day wearing full PPE – tight fitting face masks, visors or goggles, doubled up gloves – for extended periods of time as they deliver care to those most in need. Their skin and lips in particular are becoming sore, dry, cracked and split. Debs told us that she and her team are going through gallons of lip balms and skin care products so that they can keep working in the difficult conditions.”

Since appealing to their members for help, Rob and Claire the owners of energie have set out a donation box outside their gym and their members have accumulated over 4000 lip balms and skin care products of various sorts.

Claire says: “We’ve been overwhelmed by the response as members have bought products specifically, or raided their bathroom cabinets. We’ve even had big donations of lip balms from Thames Valley Police and My Milton Keynes who both supplied box loads to us! As a gym, we were able to use a member Adam Hacker’s connections to whole sale retailers to purchase 2000 handy sized skin creams that would have been sold to a hotel ordinarily.”

“Although this seems like a lot, we believe this is just a start, because, as we have promoted the appeal to our members to help support Debs and her team, other NHS teams have approached us requesting some of what we collect,” continues Rob. “Next week we will be having a Zoom conference call with those who have requested help, and will establish the best way to get the products to the point of need as quickly as possible.”

This is an on going initiative so energie Fitness are appealing to anyone else who might be able to donate anything- no matter how little or large a donation it might seem. It is all very needed and will go straight to the local medic and practitioners who need it most.

To donate, please call energie Fitness in Kiln Farm on 01908 410760 to arrange drop off or collection.