Story Photos
 Photo by Bill Wagner Jan Mott sorts through surplus medical supplies, which St. John regularly donates to help volunteers in Third World countries. |
A healthy dose of charity
Thursday, October 11, 2007 7:12 AM PDT
By Barbara LaBoe
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E-mail this articleJan Mott can't throw anything away.
Raised by a mother who was an avid recycler, Mott now has 12 different recycling garbage cans at her home. Combined with her composting efforts, Mott estimates she creates about two garbage cans a year worth of true trash that heads to the county landfill.
So it only makes sense that she does the same thing at St. John Medical Center -- including finding new homes for medical products that can't be used in the hospital but are still perfectly safe.
Mott is a nurse and the hospital's central service distribution supervisor, overseeing all of the medical supplies needed to keep the hospital running. And, in a corner of the main storeroom, she also oversees boxes of surplus supplies destined for shipping to medical mission groups across the globe.
Surgical gowns, ace bandages and gauze travel thousands of miles to other continents through the program. Other items stay closer to home, donated to local scout troop first aid kits, emergency shelters and veterinary hospitals.
All the work is an attempt to recycle or reuse as much as possible. The hospital also conducts paper and cardboard recycling programs, donates items like baby changing tables when new models are ordered and uses replaceable containers for disposal of needles.
"We work pretty hard to minimize the items that do have to wind up in the landfill," said Ed Scovil, the hospital's materials management director.
For mission groups -- including the hospital's own employees -- the recycling efforts can be a godsend.
"I think it's great," said Dr. Gretchen Potschka, who recently "shopped" among the free items to prepare for a mission trip to Ecuador. "There's so much stuff that otherwise would just get wasted."
The hospital does not donate items past the manufacturer's expiration dates, but many other items simply can't be reused at St. John because of infection control or inventory policies, Mott said.
If a surgery doesn't require all the sealed packages of gloves packed in the prepackaged surgery supply kit, for example, the gloves aren't considered hospital-grade sterile because the kit has been opened. The gloves haven't been used, but they're basically trash as far as the hospital is concerned.
For Potschka, though, the leftover gauze, gloves, ace bandages, iodine and needles and syringes she collected will be perfect for the makeshift clinic she and a friend will establish in an Ecuadorian school next month.
Potschka said even opened packages of gauze can be used depending on the circumstances.
"Some of the gauze is open .. but it will work for sopping up blood," she said. "And in many Third World countries their ideas of clean and sterile are a lot different from ours. I've sat on operating room floors and helped fold gauze with flies buzzing all around."
The surplus supplies are available to any employee going on a mission, but Mott also sends most of the items to Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, which distributes it through a network of established mission charities.
"That way I know it's not going to end up on the black market," Mott said.
There's no set schedule. Mott simply waits until the boxes of surplus supplies reach the ceiling -- usually about once a month -- and then sends them north.
"It's just really hard for me not to recycle," she said. "We always have in the back of our minds the awareness that this item could be used somewhere else."
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