Nurse Gives Second Life to Discarded Medical Supplies

One person's trash is another person's treasure, or so the saying goes. And health systems in this country generate a vast amount of trash—a great deal of which looks like treasure to staff at needy medical centers and clinics in underdeveloped countries.

Think about the items that are thrown away in your organization every day. Extra swabs, sterile needles and syringes, soap, and other seemingly insignificant items that are taken into patients' rooms in case they are needed, but that must be discarded when patients are discharged. These supplies have not been used, but they can't be put back into supply closets or used for others patients.

So they end up in the trash, generating tons of waste in landfills and doing nothing to help reduce unnecessary medical expenditure.

But there's a better way, says Elizabeth McLellan, an administrator at Maine Medical Center in Portland, who collects these unused supplies and distributes them to impoverished towns and villages in countries across Africa and South East Asia.

McLellan has been a nurse for more than 30 years, and first identified a need to collect unused supplies when she worked as an administrator at a hospital in Saudi Arabia. She would travel to countries such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and India to recruit staff, where she was confronted with the reality of medical centers and clinics that had a desperate need for supplies that were commonplace at her own organization and back home in America. So she started accumulating unused medical supplies and took them with her whenever she travelled.

After returning to Maine in the 1990s, her enthusiasm grew, and two years ago, she ramped up her efforts. She met with nurses around her hospital to discuss ways the organization could recycle unused supplies. Now nurses and housekeepers gather up the unused material in bags, which they can drop off at recycling boxes that were installed at 20 different locations in her hospital.

As word spread of her efforts, McLellan began collecting material from medical centers around the state, and her stockpile soon took over her home. In September, she was able to move the supplies to a storage facility thanks to help from AAA Northern New England. When she and a group of volunteers moved the supplies from her home, it weighed more than five tons.

In the last few months, McLellan has started a nonprofit organization, Partners for World Health, to coordinate and expand her efforts and to help other hospitals around the country undertake similar endeavors.

She says there are three reasons hospitals can get behind the call to recycle unused medical supplies. First, most hospitals pay a disposal fee to get rid of trash, which is calculated based on the weight of trash generated.

"If I take 50,000 pounds of medical supplies that were headed for the trash out of Maine Medical Center," says McLellan, "that lowers their disposal fee, which decreases their expenses."

Second, such programs benefit the environment. Most of the material that McLellan collects is composed of plastic or other non-biodegradable materials. Recycling these supplies means they don't end up in a landfill. And McLellan says healthcare professionals are usually delighted to find a way to prevent needless waste. Last, and most importantly, such programs present an opportunity to distribute supplies to people who are less fortunate than us and to make a difference for good in the world.

She shares an example about sterile syringes and sterile needles of all different sizes, which are one of the most common items she receives and that are in desperately short supply in third world countries.

"They draw up the medication in a syringe and give 1 cc of medication to you and they turn around, and with the same needle, they give the other cc to another person. Because they don't have an abundant supply of sterile needles and syringes," says McLellan. "So they are passing HIV from one person to another with dirty needles."

"Every hospital throws these away by the thousand. These need to be saved so we can provide a supply to people in the third world and stop this from happening."

All of the discarded items are a gift to the recipients, which are never big city hospitals, which tend to have reasonable supplies. Rather, they are little towns or villages, such as Turmi in Ethiopia, which she says is a torturous eight-hour drive from Addis Ababa and whose medical center lacks basic necessities.

McLellan's next trip is to Cambodia over Christmas, where she hopes her newly-minted organization will eventually be able to convert a boat to become a clinic that will travel up and down the Mekong River from Phnom Penh to Siem providing medical care to rural areas of Cambodia. Her goal is for the operation to be staffed by a revolving cadre of volunteers.

In the spirit of the season, when many of us are looking for ways to do something for those less privileged than us, McLellan's effort is a shining example. To find out more information or learn how to start a similar program, follow Partners for World Health on Facebook, or contact McLellan at 207-671-4723 or Mclellan.elizabeth@gmail.com.