2020 Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Awards

22 GHP / 2020 Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Awards , Sep20776 Best Healthcare Uniform Provider 2020 - Gävleborg County For more than four decades, Birgitta Persson has been delivering textiles teaching of the highest quality, whilst also running her own local clothing company throughout the 1980s and 1990s with a loyal customer base. Using her passion and dedicated to the craft of textiles, Birgitta and her son, Tomas Persson, have together developed and delivered one of the best healthcare uniformmaterials and styles to come out inmodernmemory. Find out more as we highlight the success of HealthTextiles in the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Awards 2020. Birgitta Persson has been a textiles teacher in Gävle, Sweden for over forty years, whilst simultaneously running her own local clothing company in the 1980s and 1990s with a loyal customer base. Passion for fabrics and materials may be one thing, but Birgitta began to notice that the knowledge and expertise that was so evident within her area of speciality was not being passed down to the next generation, and instead being lost to time. Birgitta took it upon herself to share her craft, and continue on the proud history and tradition of the Gävleborg region of being a place of textile excellence. After she retired, Birgitta decided that she would set up a vocational school in textiles and design, rather than allow her passion for the craft to go to waste. It was during this time around the foundation of the vocational school that Birgitta also found out about a new material, one that had anti-bacterial properties, and also one that Birgitta has never heard about in all her years of teaching and working in the field. The more she researched this new material alongside her son, Tomas Persson, the more Birgitta became convinced that anti-bacterial clothing could be beneficial for those working in the healthcare industry, significantly more so than ordinary cotton or polyester materials. Tomas, a Harvard Business School graduate and serial entrepreneur, immediately realized that clothing and uniforms with anti-bacterial properties could revolutionize the healthcare sector, and be valuable for personnel in high- risk germ environments. Tomas also noted that the fabric was significantly more sustainable that the traditional textiles that had gone before it, offering another incentive for healthcare facilities to buy into it. Together, Tomas and Birgitta travelled to China, where they partnered with a local business partner who was a friend of Tomas’, and had extensive knowledge of the local textile industry. Partnering alongside one another, the trio created their first uniform prototype and, after field testing with healthcare professionals, fine-tuned their unique product even further. Today, the retired textiles teacher from Gävle, alongside her husband and son, is a majority owner of HealthTextiles, offering unique anti-bacterial uniforms with Swedish quality and design at every turn. The uniforms themselves have since found fans and fame in hospitals, health clinics, and nursing home, and the team at HealthTextiles are now more excited than ever before for what the investment community may empower it to do next. In essence, HealthTextiles is all about revolutionizing the healthcare uniforms of the past, introducing these outstanding, new anti-bacterial, sustainable, and comfortable forms of clothing instead. Today, HealthTextiles continues to create clothes and uniforms for the healthcare sector with anti- bacterial properties, made from a revolutionary materials known at TorTex. What exactly makes TorTex so unique, comfortable, and revolutionary for the healthcare industry, and how did Birgitta and Tomas identify its properties? Firstly, TorTex is an optimal blend of several fibres that, when combined together, have undergone a complex technological process that results in the comfortable, anti-bacterial, and sustainable properties that the wearer experiences. It is also this combination that ensure the clothes are comfortable. Comfort is a key thing for healthcare workers, who are often on their feet all day and rushing after patients that need care. Comfort is something that they deserve, and need when working tiring shifts. TorTex from HealthTextiles ensures that the wearer can experience comfort throughout their shift, whilst also being aware that their clothes are good for the environments and can keep them protected from bacteria exposure whilst on the job. HealthTextiles is the first company in the world to develop TorTex-based fabrics, and both Birgitta and Tomas are convinced that there is no fabric that is softer, more comfortable, and more sustainable that works at an affordable price and offers so much to the healthcare sector. In addition to this, TorTex’s unique patented design and antimicrobial properties are scientifically proven to prevent 99.9% of virus and bacteria, as well as reduce the risk of infection by 20x compared to standard PPE fabrics. TorTex organic antimicrobial capability is without coatings such as silver / nano silver. By avoiding silver, TorTex helps reduce the risks of antibiotic resistance and environmental pollution. TorTex does not release any harmful substances that have been verified by Hohenstein. Within the healthcare sector, the clothing lines that HealthTextiles has created have been designed specifically for the needs of those who work in hospitals, health clinics, and nursing homes. Whenever a job involves frequent contact with sick patients, the risk for contamination can be incredibly high. In these situations, the regular uniforms of cotton and polyester material are simply not good enough, or optimal, both from an anti- bacterial and sustainable or environmental perspective. According to research conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO), resistant bacteria is one of the biggest and greatest threats to humanity. In Sweden alone, where HealthTextiles is based, health-associated infections from bacteria exposure in hospitals can cost approximately between six and seven billion SEK annually, and that is according to figures from the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions. Company: Health Textiles Contact: Tomas Persson Website: https://www.healthtextiles.com/