This past Monday night, Hopkins student group SHARE — Supporting Hospitals Abroad with Resources and Equipment — organized an informational speaker event, with hosts Dr. Richard Redett and Dr. Fizan Abdullah, in the Charles Commons Banquet Room. A completely student-run group, SHARE aims to collect unused or reusable medical supplies usually thrown out by Hopkins Hospital, eventually sorting, packaging and shipping them abroad.
These supplies are delivered in one of two ways: via Hopkins affiliates going on a medical service trip or via Humanity First, a group of both medical professionals and volunteers who serve disaster-stricken and extremely impoverished areas throughout the world.
Dr. Abdullah, a doctor at JHMI, is Medical Director of Humanity First and thus works very closely with SHARE, while Dr. Redett is director of the program as well as an associate professor of plastic surgery and director of both pediatric plastic surgery and plastic surgery residency at Hopkins.
Redett, who initially wanted to become a biologist and had no interest in being a doctor, looked back to his formative years and his experience working with impoverished children in Africa. “When I went to Africa in 1986 . . . malaria, pneumonia, HIV and measles were killing these kids,” Redett said. “Kids like that really stood no chance, they were such a minority . . . so low on the public health ladder. That was the very first time that I became interested in, if not plastic surgery, medicine.”
Turning the discussion to the service trips going on currently, Reddett spoke of two goals. “We do surgeries, cleft surgeries, hand surgeries,” he said. “More importantly, though, we teach others how to perform [these surgeries].”
The problem lies in the poor economies of these nations. “When I go to Peru a couple times a year, most of the surgeons tell me that they have a half day a month when they’re required to do repair cleft surgery or burn surgery or hand surgery on poor children,” Redett said.
The problems affecting medical institutions in developing counties is much more basic. “Many times they don’t even do that half day, because they don’t have sutures. They don’t have IV fluid, they don’t have gas for the anesthesia,” Redett said.
SHARE recycles and ships unused or “gently used” equipment to developing nations that lack fundamental medical supplies. The organization has grown exponentially over the past few years.
“The very first meeting I went to for SHARE was on the 9th floor of the children’s hospital and there were 5 or 6 people there,” Redett said. “Talking about how to restructure SHARE, no one thought that we’d have 95 volunteers [today].”
“[Around five years ago] we were probably sending 1000 or 1500 lbs of supplies overseas. Last year you guys sent 11,000 lbs, and that’s pretty impressive,” Redett said.
The manner in which these supplies are shipped can differ. “We ship ahead of time, if we have a lot of stuff, or we carry it with us. It depends on whether where we’re going is an established site such that we don’t worry about the stuff getting stolen,” Redett said. “It’s really expensive to ship.”
In addition to hand-carrying it and utilizing Humanity First, SHARE has also developed relationships with different hospitals abroad.
“If a hospital in Central or South America asks for equipment and we know the hospital, the people, and we know it’ll be put to good use, then we would send it,” said Redett. “Most of the time, though, it’s through Humanity First.”
Dr. Fizan Abdullah, who took the floor next, approached medical service from a slightly different perspective, emphasizing the importance of surgery throughout the developing world. Abdullah began with his service trip to Ghana, which was funded by the Bloomberg Philanthropy Fund. The goal of this trip was to determine who exactly was administering medical care, and the results were often quite frightening.
“[Often] the medical officer is doing surgery, which is equivalent to an intern who just graduated medical school performing surgery. That’s pretty scary,” Abdullah said.
This problem spoke to an issue that both Humanity First and other service groups have to deal with frequently: Is it acceptable to train those “unqualified” to perform surgery?
“There is a huge medical opposition to the concept of people who are not fully trained performing surgeries. It is a significant battle happening in the realm of international public health,” said Abdullah. “Surgery is the ‘neglected stepchild of public health.’”
This event is the first of its kind for SHARE, which is in many ways still a fledgling organization. “When I was a freshman, SHARE only had 4 undergrads, including myself, but now we have 95 volunteers,” said junior co-president Neel Pasricha. “It was an ideal time to have an event for both new volunteers and laypeople to meet doctors Redett and Abdullah.”
“Our goal in bringing Dr. Redett and Dr. Abdullah [here] was to have students hear their perspectives. Having gone abroad numerous times, these doctors can truly speak to the mission of SHARE,” said Pasricha. “It gives great perspective on both medicine and responsibility. We shouldn’t be wasting these supplies when people are literally dying without them.”
According to Pasricha, in addition to giving knowledge to the general public, the event served to show how volunteers actually contribute.
“For those asking themselves ‘Am I really making a difference?’ seeing videos of mission trips made it all worthwhile,” Pasricha said. “It made us aware of how the work we do at JHU has impacted the world and how much potential we have by cutting our waste and providing other countries with supplies they really need.”
Freshman Lydia Liang, newly elected public relations leader for SHARE, agreed with this point. “What I enjoyed most was that it allowed us, as members of SHARE, to put what we do in a global context,” Liang said. “We can see the impact that we have from Baltimore.”
“Our goal is for other hospitals to adopt the SHARE model and change the amount of supplies they actually take out. They have surgical packs that oftentimes remain untouched by surgeons, yet get thrown out at the end of every single surgery. Such a system is inherently wasteful and we hope to change the way in which hospitals allocate resources in this and other areas,” Pasricha said.
—Additional reporting by Greg Sgammato
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