20th May 2020
Making hospital scrubs with Helping Dress Medics
Helping Dress Medics was started when, due to the pandemic lockdown, filming was halted on the series 2 adaptation of His Dark Materials for the BBC. Everyone working on it suddenly found themselves at a loose end, and so the costume makers began making scrubs and other PPE for anyone who needed them.
The initial idea came from Dulcie Scott, the Costume Supervisor on HDM, as she wanted to help one nurse in her local village. After this, both the idea and the team grew and the makers from `His Dark Materials’ were joined by makers from other productions around the U.K such as Batman, Sex Education and Poldark. With the support of Bad Wolf and people like Philip Pullman, Jack Thorne and Hugh Bonneville, the funding took off and the team have now raised a staggering £50,000. As Dulcie mentioned in her recent interview for the BBC, the teams around the country have already managed “to provide 6500 scrubs so far” to places like the Royal Gwent Hospital and the Marie Curie Hospice with orders for several other hospitals on their way.
As a costume maker myself I approached Dulcie to see if I could help, and I was sent 33 sets of scrubs to make up (a uniform factory has offered it’s services for cutting the fabric). I asked two other very talented costumiers I regularly work with, Sue Smith and Annemarie Norton, to help me and enlisted my daughter Flossie as my assistant.
Three weeks later the scrubs were all ready and we delivered them to one of our local hospitals in East london, Whipps Cross, where they were very gladly received!
If you would like to donate to HDM please visit their GoFundMe page
https://uk.gofundme.com/f/helping-dress-medics
