It has been announced that 2 billion PPE items have been delivered through eBay’s PPE Portal, just a few months after announcing their 1 billion item milestone. This last week alone has seen a record-breaking 110 million items shipped showing how the portal is providing a critical and efficient foundation to those on the frontline.
The Portal is currently helping Domiciliary Care Providers, Residential Care Providers, GP Practices, Pharmacies, Optometrists, The Dental sector, Children’s Social Care, and Drug and Alcohol Services get access to critical PPE during the pandemic.
Accelerated PPE delivery
To put it into perspective by the beginning of November the portal had shipped 325 million items of PPE to 40,000 providers. One month later the total number had reached 500 million, in January 2021 it breached the 1 billion mark and now, at the end of March we see the 2 billionth item shipped.
The ability to get such a huge amount of PPE out to where it is needed so quickly has been thanks to eBay and the hundreds of people from across DHSC and the military, Clipper, Unipart, Volo Commerce, Royal Mail, and others who have all played their part in building and maintaining the software solution and logistics infrastructure as well as managing the flow of orders for PPE items and getting them out of the door.
You might wonder why an NHS PPE Portal was needed – surely care providers have PPE anyway? The answer is that the PPE portal can be used by social care and primary care providers to get critical COVID-19 PPE that they are required to use over and above what would have been used before the pandemic. Unusual times call for stricter protection than would normally be needed and getting tens of millions of items shipped seven days a week needed a new emergency solution. eBay stepped up to build one and as demonstrated by their new figures, this solution is working brilliantly.
