With healthcare workers facing shortages of protective equipment such as masks, gloves and visors, an informal network of doctors, engineers, designers and 3D printing hobbyists is scrambling to produce these in Australia.

Domestic stocks of personal protective equipment (PPE) are dwindling due to high global demand. The World Health Organisation estimates frontline healthcare workers will require at least 89 million masks, 76 million gloves, and 2.9 million litres of hand sanitiser every month during the global COVID-19 response.

One solution is to ramp up domestic production, but it may take weeks or months to retool factories to do this work.

A stopgap measure is 3D printing, which can rapidly make plastic parts.

Though gloves and masks can't be 3D printed, the face visors or shields that medical staff wear over face masks while treating patients can be churned out in batches of several thousands a day from industrial printers.

Over the past week, Australian university 3D printing labs and other 'maker spaces' have been turned over to face visor production.

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Whatsapp 3D-printed headband components of face visors, which will be attached to A4 plastic shields.

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Whatsapp Healthcare workers in PPE including face shields.

Those involved say they're working as fast as possible to navigate regulations around supplying medical equipment and meet demand from the hospitals themselves, which they expect will need tens of thousands in the coming weeks.

One of the main groups, COVID SOS, has representatives from six major hospitals in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne as well as six universities.

Dr Blake Cochran, a lecturer at the UNSW school of medical sciences and one of the main organisers of COVID SOS, says the group is harnessing the design and production skills of people who want to help with the PPE shortage, and then linking them up with clinicians who can request equipment.

"On the COVID SOS website you can post what you can do and what you need," he said.

NSW Health has already lodged an initial order with the design lab at UNSW for 2500 face visors, he said. Private clinics have also got in touch.

"Some hospitals have requested 2000 a week for 6 weeks," he said.

Metro North Hospital in Brisbane has called on the 3D printing community, including hobbyists, to help it produce 3000 face shields in three weeks. It posted the files for printing the face shields on its website - anyone can download them and, if they have a standard 3D printer, make face shields for the hospital staff.

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Dr Jas Coles-Black, a COVID SOS organiser and doctor and researcher at University of Melbourne, told Hack she's fielded requests for face shields from hospitals including Wollongong and Royal Melbourne.

"Before the COVID SOS website, everyone has just been messaging WhatsApp groups," she said.

"You get dumped into conversations at different hospitals. They say, 'I'm from X hospital and I'm short of face shields. I need 5,000.'"

"Every hospital has different PPE shortages, which is why it is important to ask clinicians at the coal face how we can help."

Regulations a 'grey area'

Those producing the face visors say they're not entirely sure they comply with the Therapeutic Goods Administration's (TGA's) regulation of PPE.

"The short answer is that it's complicated and a pretty grey area," Dr Blake Cochran said.

"We have a request from NSW Health and we're operating under the assumption that as a result we're going to be able to provide them with the face shield.

"Using the face shield is subject to their interpretation of the regulations.

"There's no legal restriction on us producing face shields in the hope we'll give them to the organisations we're allowed to give them to."

The TGA announced late last month that supplies of PPE may run low in the pandemic and advised health organisations to "plan accordingly in a composed manner". It's understood the regulator has been working to streamline the approvals process and generally free up hospitals to find new suppliers of PPE.

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Whatsapp Metro North hospital operations manager Mathilde Desselle with 3D printer.

On Monday, doctors at a Sydney hospital claimed they were told to re-use single-use N95 or P2 face masks due to dwindling supplies. A NSW Health spokesperson said the supply of masks in public hospitals across the state was "sufficient".

Referring to this, Dr Cochran said the urgency of the situation meant some regulations around supply may have to be sidestepped.

"I'm sure in the regulations face masks aren't meant to be reused," he said.

"Some PPE is better than no PPE.

"Healthcare workers at such heightened risk we need to do what we can to protect them."

'We're here if you need us': 3D printer community

This work is also happening outside the universities.

On the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies Facebook group (64,000 members), people around the world are sharing techniques for repurposing snorkeling masks as PPE, or assembling ventilators from household parts.

An Australian offshoot has about 300 members. Several dozen of these meet daily through a Slack working group, MobiliseAusCov19.

Andrew Gray, the director of the Bioquisitive community lab in Melbourne, says there are hundreds of people in Australia with 3D printers that can each produce at least 36 face shields per day - adding up to tens of thousands.

"We follow a distributed model where all the hobbyists who have 3D printers at home can contribute to the cause," he said.

"The big tricky question is the TGA - we're trying to figure out how we handle that."

He said he was aware hospitals generally did not want members of the public sending in PPE they had made themselves, as it may be unsafe.

The group is working on standardising design and quality and setting up 'contactless' collection points where members can send their homemade PPE. He said they would only be supplying hospitals if requested.

"We're here if you need us," he said

"It comes down to the question - is something better than nothing?"

Dr Jas Coles-Black says 3D printer hobbyists may be able to play a role, but they should always first check with local health services.

"It's no good showing up at a hospital with a box of 3D-printed PPE that may or may not work as intended," she said.

On Wednesday, the New South Wales Government called on local manufacturers to help meet demand for personal protective equipment.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said that the government would help manufacturers re-tool in order to produce the PPE.

Once factories pivot to PPE, there'll be no need for 3D printing, Dr Jas Coles-Black says.

"We're not going to be producing face shields this entire crisis - we're going to be printing them until large manufacturing can pivot," she said.

"The runs they can do are much greater than 3D printing."

"Then we move on to the next problem."