Fujifilm Europe has announced a new initiative to “support healthcare workers with Instax.” The program involves donating Instax cameras and film to hospitals across the continent, in order to help doctors and nurses connect with patients without removing their Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
The threat of coronavirus infection makes it difficult for doctors to connect with the patients they are treating. When decked out in PPE, you might only see your caretaker’s eyes, which are themselves hidden behind the glare of goggles of a face shield. And while photography might not be able to do much to help treat patients or protect healthcare workers, Fuji thinks that it can help foster a closer connection between doctors and nurses, and the patients that they’re taking care of.
The new initiative, announced earlier today, involves donating Instax cameras and film to hospitals across Europe so that doctors can snap a photo of themselves and attach it to their PPE. This way, they can “share their friendly faces from behind their PPE”—a reminder that there’s a human on the other side of the gown, gloves, goggles and N95 mask.
“Donating Instax cameras and film is just a small way in which Fujifilm is able to help,” says Hiromoto Matsushima, Senior Vice President of Photo Imaging for Fujifilm Europe. “But to both healthcare workers and patients, we’ve been told that by being able to easily show the friendly face behind the PPE, it can help bring comfort and understanding in the most difficult of situations.”
So far, they’ve donated some 120 Instax cameras and 7,500 Instax prints to hospitals in the UK, the Netherlands, Turkey, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Russia, France and Denmark. The company is prioritizing ICU and critical care workers first, but administrators at interested hospitals can contact their region’s Fujifilm Corporate Communications representative if they want to participate.
(via DPReview)
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