Personalities: Long Distance Care

When Lisa De La Rosa, manager of clinical engineering at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, CA, heard that newborn babies were kept in cardboard boxes in an African hospital, she mobilized the nurses and soon sent several infant warmers for the needy patients. When she saw photos from another African hospital revealing a sparse dirt-floor waiting room, she organized volunteers to mend slightly damaged chairs so the faraway patients would have more comfortable seating. When she learned Afghan amputees were dragging themselves about their war-torn villages, she collected spare gurneys so they could move with dignity. The local children push the amputees where they need to go, and they call the gurneys "cars."

"That brought out a very good comfort, a feeling of knowing that we’re trying to move them up," De La Rosa says.

De La Rosa got involved when El Camino’s CEO asked her to contact Orchard International, the organization that facilitates the donations. But she does more than merely donate. She reacts to any specific wants she learns about and will do anything to get the items to the hospitals in need—from asking her clinical engineering team to fix an old ultrasound machine to send out, to driving a truck to other local hospitals to pick up spare equipment that El Camino doesn’t have.

One Afghan hospital was so grateful that it renamed its facility after El Camino. "My feeling was always that there is a piece of El Camino Hospital over there," she says. Despite all of these efforts, De La Rosa knows there is still a great need for hospital supplies in undeveloped countries that is not being met, and there is a great deal of needless waste in what American hospitals discard.

"I think a program like this can be set up" in any hospital, she says. "I understand resources are difficult [to come by], but maybe if we put it out there we can work together . . . and ensure that this equipment gets out there.

"I know we have hospitals in the United States that could be offered the same consideration, but I think the third-world countries are in greater need."

—Marianne Aiello