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With the Coronavirus once again on the rise in the UK, we asked eBay for an update on the eBay PPE Portal, a partnership with the NHS Supply Chain and DHSC (Department for Health and Social Care). eBay are already responding to what’s looking like the 2nd pandemic wave and told us that they are extending their partnership, with their distribution partners, to expand their supply of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) until the end of March 2021.
The partners that came together to build the eBay PPE Portal include the eBay Developer Ecosystem (DECO) team and Berlin based eBay Commerce Innovations team, Volo who are managing the updates to stock levels and tracking information for deliveries, and the Armed Forces, Clipper and Royal Mail for logistics and distribution.
The NHS portal, first launched in April 2020 as a limited ‘emergency top-up’, will now be significantly scaled to meet the extra need for PPE through the challenging winter months, and in the face of rising COVID-19 cases. Orders on the PPE portal were previously restricted to focus on providing emergency items to the providers that needed it most.
Order limits have now been updated and increased so that eligible health and social care providers across England can order PPE through the portal, free of charge, until at least March 2021. The eligible services now include residential care homes and domiciliary care providers, children’s care homes and secure homes, children’s residential special schools, GPs, community pharmacies, dentists, orthodontists and optometrists in England.
At full service, up to 200 million items of PPE could be delivered every week to primary and social care providers across England. The PPE portal is part of the Government’s newly-announced ‘PPE Strategy’ and intended to be used for COVID-19 health and care provision only.
The portal is built on eBay’s marketplace technology, allowing an NHS database of healthcare workers to log in and ‘order’ for a limited range of non-acute PPE via the NHS Catalogue. eBay is providing this service to DHSC and the NHS totally free of charge.
“We’ve been working with the Government and our partners on the PPE Portal since the early stages of lockdown, and as we face a second wave in the UK, we’re proud to play a small part in helping to get PPE in to the right places as part of the new national strategy.”
– Murray Lambell, UK General Manager, eBay
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