Visiting Nurse Home Care and Hospice of Carroll County

At A Glance

Location: 

North Conway, New Hampshire

Primary Issue Area:

  • Environmental Health

Active since:

2020

Core volunteers:

20

Our Purpose

Our purpose is to create resusable fabric masks for the Mount Washington Valley community, starting with the staff and patients of Visiting Nurse Home Care and Hospice of Carroll County, in an effort to reduce transmission risk of COVID-19 to vulnerable home bound individuals requiring health care and hospice services at home, and the clinical staff who care for them, while helping to conserve the limited supply of medical personal protective equipment for the health care workers most at risk. This public health initiative was started on March 24th, organized by the hospice volunteer coordinator, who mobilized hospice volunteers and other community members who sew. Our initial goal was to create 100 masks in the first week of production, which we exceeded.  Since the CDC recommendation on April 3, that all people wear masks when going out in public, demand increased and we expanded in a mutual aide response to supply masks to other agencies and individuals in the community who are in need, including our local community mental health agency, homeless shelter, food shelf workers, grocery store workers, and other individuals with no other access to masks. We continue to provide masks for the patients who were our original idenfitied recipients, and to our staff, volunteers, and their immediate familes.