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06 September 2007
U.S.-Based Charity Sends Unused Medical Supplies to Africa
“Doc to Dock” seeks to improve health care system in developing world
Washington -- Early in 2007, a young boy at the Hubert Maga Hospital in Cotonou, Benin, with a severe version of malaria benefited from intravenous therapy made possible by Doc to Dock, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that collects unused supplies from U.S. medical centers and ships them to hospitals in Africa.
“He was not responding to oral therapy,” said Dr. Bruce Charash, the founder of the organization. “They had been desperate to give him intravenous therapy but there was no intravenous line in Benin. I arrived the day the container [of medical supplies] arrived and we were able to pull out of the container an intravenous line and he was able to get the intravenous drugs. Before I left, I checked in on him, and he was doing well.”
U.S. government regulations force hospitals to discard any unused medical supplies in an opened outer package even if the remaining items are individually wrapped and sterile. In addition, thousands of tons of medical supplies are discarded every day in the United States due to overproduction and procedural excess. Charash, a New York cardiologist, decided in 2005 that something had to be done to get these surplus medical supplies and equipment to hospitals in the developing world where they were desperately needed.
Today, bins are set up in operating rooms and suites at hospitals who participate in the Doc to Dock program. The unused supplies are collected and then delivered to warehouses for sorting and inventorying by volunteers. Medical centers in Africa can select and order the supplies they need from that inventory. Seventeen hospitals participate directly in Doc to Dock, and the Greater New York Hospital Association, comprising nearly 300 hospitals, is a partner in the program.
Equipment includes hospital beds, stretchers, wheelchairs, walkers, cardiac monitors and X-ray machines -- all of them in good working condition. In the United States, “we’re constantly refreshing and renovating hospitals,” Charash told USINFO. “When that happens, the hospital offers us access to the entire wing they’re getting rid of and we can take everything that works, and then we will make sure the electronics work, and we will install them in the recipient country.”
Doc to Dock even provides manuals for the equipment in the particular country’s language. “The reason why we dispose of working-condition old supplies is that we’re often driven to get the next new model,” Charash said, even though the old wheelchair, stretcher or cardiac monitor is perfectly good. The organization also collects and ships to African hospitals one-time-use sterile supplies such as surgical gloves, syringes and intravenous lines.
“In operating rooms in the United States, if someone is going for chest surgery, the nurses will prepare the operating room by opening up a kit, which is a pre-made collection of surgical supplies called a chest kit. The chest kit, may within its own individually wrapped container, have 180 individually wrapped sterile items inside of it.” U.S. regulations require that whatever is not used during the surgery be discarded, even though the supplies remain untouched in their original sterile wrapping. U.S. surgical kits contain 30 percent to 40 percent more supplies than typically are needed for a surgery, according to Charash. “As long as those things are being wasted, we will collect them, redistributing them for free to countries with the greatest need,” he said.
As Doc to Dock became established, Charash and his collaborators realized the organization can strengthen the efforts of the international community to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, meningitis and other diseases. “We are not just sending supplies but we’re also investing with the governments of the countries where we’re working ... in a broader effort to improve the health care system.”
Doc to Docks is setting up e-mail exchanges between recipient hospitals in Africa and teaching hospitals in the United States. “We’ll have doctors teaching infectious disease talking to the doctors training in infectious disease for consultation,” he said. Doc to Dock also is exchanging medical missions with the African hospitals and working on collateral projects in public health, health care worker safety and sanitation. “So we’re bringing in American medical minds both through the Internet and eventually to do service,” he said. “We’re trying to not just send one container but have it as a steady stream -- to be a pipeline -- so once we start getting involved we continue.”
Doc to Dock is working with other philanthropic groups and organizations like the U.N. Office of Sport for Peace and Development. A shipment of supplies to Benin, for example, was sent by Medshare International, an Atlanta-based NGO that also sends surplus medical supplies where they are needed. Doc to Dock selected the recipient hospital and paid for Medshare to send the shipment.
“That kind of collaboration is essential,” Charash said. “We have formed many partnerships because that’s the essence of efficiency.” The next container to be sent to Benin will come from Doc to Dock’s warehouse, he added.
More information on Doc to Dock is available on the organization’s Web site.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
