Several UGM students and alumni collaborated to produce personal protective equipment such as face shields to support the handling of COVID-19 in various health facilities. This initiative emerged after they saw the lack of availability of protective gear for medical officers.
“Medics, they are at the forefront in fighting COVID-19 so that the availability of PPE is vital in handling this outbreak. We have enough resources to develop and produce PPE face shields, and from there, we think, why don’t we help provide it,” said Muhammad Fahmi Husaen, an alumnus of D3 Computer Science at the UGM Vocational School.
Fahmi, together with several alumni colleagues and students, created a community called AmalYuk to help provide PPE for medical personnel. The activities they carry out, he said, were purely a charity movement. Therefore, the face shields they produce are distributed free of charge to hospitals which urgently need PPE.
“AmalYuk is a combination of individuals, UGM Vocational School campus, and startup company WiranagariTech. With 16 members consisting of alumni and UGM students, we jointly initiated the charity movement,” he explained.
The students and alumni involved mostly have a background in mechanical engineering education as well as electronics and instrumentation, and receive guidance from one of Elins lecturers, Budi Sumanto. They carried out the production activities in the Elins Laboratory of UGM Vocational School.
This team can produce 40-80 face shields a day. They distributed the product to several places, including PMI Bantul and Grhasia Pakem Hospital.
“We are also working with KAGAMA arena to distribute them,” added Rokhim as the coordinator of this team.
In the future, the team is targeting to produce up to 1,300 face shields. Rokhim added that the production activities they carried out were something that was carried out in an emergency to support the availability of PPE that was needed immediately.
After the team met the production targets, they will evaluate whether they still need to produce face shields.
“We are targeting 1,300; afterwards we will probably evaluate considering this is an emergency device, and around Jogja, there are already factories that produce mass and have standards,” he concluded.
Author: Gloria
Translator: Natasa A