Covid-19 safety 'pods' at Featherstone care home donated to the Science Museum in London

Vicarage Court in Featherstone has given its Covid safety booth to the museum, a major tourist attraction in the capital.

In November 2020, the care home went viral after its staff posted about the ingenious cubicle that kept residents safe during the health pandemic and how families were still able to visit loved ones, on social media.

Built in the home’s lounge, the pod allowed visitors to enter through the external French doors and sit face to face with their relative sitting on the opposite side of a clear screen.

The booths were so secure that the care home did not lose any of its 70 residents to Covid-19 since 2020.

Jag Singh, Vicarage Garden Homes managing director, said: “We constructed the booth in the first few weeks of the pandemic after we realised that families not being able to visit would be a major issue for our residents.

"We didn’t lose anyone through Covid, even though we are one of the largest homes in Wakefield, we were very careful in the way we did things.

"I remember creating it on a Friday, putting it on our Facebook page, and it went viral over the weekend. By the following Monday, 2.9m people had viewed the post.”

The pod will go the Collecting Covid-19 collection at the Science Museum in London, which began collecting Covid materials at the beginning of the pandemic, to preserve the materials that reflect the medical, public health, industrial and scientific responses to the coronavirus pandemic.