Your Village in Lockdown features three communities in tomorrow’s Free Press - Watchet, Dunster and Carhampton.

The feature on Watchet reveals how the town’s Coronavirus Support Group volunteers are busy delivering food and prescriptions in response to over 600 requests from residents while also providing vital personal protection equipment for nurses both locally and as far away as Lincoln as the pandemic crisis deepens.

A team of skilled seamstresses under Janet Tapp, of WACTET, and Simon Brown of the Cotton Street alterations and repair business, have already dispatched over 500 packs of sterile clothing bags to hospitals in Chard, Bridgwater, Minehead, Williton and Taunton and there are plans for increased production and even more safety products.

PPE problems facing the local NHS were tackled by Simon, Janet and Julian Bloys from Julians Laundry, Minehead, after they heard that nurses were having difficulty changing their clothes after a shift to avoid contaminating their families.

Janet and her team have solved the problem by making wash-bags out of sterile pillow-cases supplied by Julian so that nurses can changes clothes on the ward, put infected clothing straight into a bag and then into a washing machine.

The full feature is in tomorrow’s Free Press.