The Royal Mint is set to start producing medical visors for the NHS to help fill the gap in protective equipment for frontline medical staff in the UK.

The Royal Mint will produce the visor in their state of the art manufacturing plant in Llantrisant.

Usually associated with the production of coins, engineers at the Royal Mint were keen to support the NHS and set about production after finding prototype designs on the internet.

The initial batch of orders will be provided to the Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board Wales but say the have capacity to provide thousands of visors. To facilitate the ramp up in production, the Royal Mint have put out requests for rate materials.

Leighton John, Director of Operations for The Royal Mint commented: “My sister works for the NHS and it really focuses your mind on the challenges they are facing, and the opportunity we have to support them.

“On Wednesday at 9am we knew nothing about medical visors, but we set our engineers the task of developing essential medical equipment which could be easily made on site – within seven hours they’d created a medical visor, and within 48 hours it was approved for mass manufacture. We’ll shortly post the specifications on our website to enable other firms to make them too.

“We are now developing the production line, and urgently calling for help to source 1.0mm PET clear plastic which is in low supply across the UK. We believe firms will have this in stock, and we’d urge them to get in touch with us so we can continue to support our NHS.”

The Royal Mint joins a wave of companies shifting their manufacturing abilities to help fight coronavirus; LVMH have started producing hand sanitiser, F1 teams are making ventilators and Amazon is helping with distribution.