Dounreay offered large supplies of PPE to health workers in Caithness - but the bureaucrats said "no"

I was kindly sent some information yesterday about community procurement of PPE in the Highlands (from businesses, police and the like), which is intended to help plug the gaps in the totally inadequate NHS supplies.  I gather that some of the details were featured on Channel 4 News recently, but the most striking revelation is that Dounreay offered a large supply of PPE to the NHS in Caithness, and it was turned down by management because it hadn't followed the normal procurement guidelines.  Frontline staff were understandably furious that bureaucratic absurdities had left them needlessly at risk.  It seems pretty likely that supplies that are good enough for decommissioning Scotland's most dangerous radioactive site would be of great use to NHS workers.  [UPDATE: I see from a news story posted in the last few hours that a donation from Dounreay appears to have been accepted, so it looks like the original decision was reversed either wholly or in part.  A 'better late than never' moment - we've had quite a few of those during this crisis.]

There are also suggestions that the PPE that has arrived from central procurement is much inferior to the supplies that have come from local businesses - for example, glasses that fall off and gowns that don't cover elbows or the whole of arms.  There's a plea for the Scottish Government to follow the example of other nations by urging industry to donate their PPE to the NHS.

It's well-known that the shortages of PPE (and the inadequacies of the supplies that do exist) are a massive problem because they put health workers at grave risk of infection and illness, and also because seriously ill patients are much less likely to receive optimum treatment if a significant percentage of health workers are self-isolating after showing symptoms.  But there's also a third issue: lack of PPE is a significant factor in fuelling the overall epidemic.  I believe I'm correct in saying that in Italy, no fewer than 8% of all confirmed cases are health workers.  Many of those people have gone home and infected family members.

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On a totally unrelated subject, I've been having a look at the datasets for the recent Scottish poll from Panelbase, and you might be interested to know just how close we came to a 50/50 split on the independence question.  After weighting, 415 respondents said they would vote Yes, and 424 said they would vote No.  That works out as Yes 49.46%, No 50.54%.  (Those figures are approximate, because I'm fairly sure that even weighted respondents are rounded to the nearest whole number.)  If the Yes figure had been 49.5% or above, it would have been reported as 50%.  So it looks as if just the tiniest smidgeon more would have kept Yes in the 50s - which is pretty incredible in the middle of the biggest international crisis since the Second World War.