Organizing bodegas

I really hesitated to use such a benign and boring term in the title for this post, but to organize the surgical supplies at Hospital Loma de Luz is anything but benign or boring.

This is Dr. Elizabeth, a surgical resident from Florida visiting Loma de Luz.

I met Dr. Elizabeth when she came with the Pediatric Surgery Team that had visited back in February. At the time she had approached me about any potential research project that she could help with. (This was a requirement for a program she is in back in the States.) I offered a couple of questions, best summarized by asking, "Is there an ideal or best way to inventory, organize and manage surgical donations at mission hospitals?" In truth, I may have had an ulterior motive for offering up such a topic. There is not one single surgical bodega on the Loma de Luz campus. Not even just two. But surgical supplies are spread out in five different storage locations. Supplies upon supplies in various degrees of expiration stacked upon each other and covered with dust. Totes upon boxes, and boxes upon totes of unknown contents floor to ceiling and unlabeled. In short, so overwhelming of a task that having someone with an outside goal and deadline was required to help me actually tackle it.

Dr. Elizabeth is currently in the middle of her 6-week visit to do as much leg work as possible to answer the proposed question. In between, or after surgeries have finished for the day, we continue the task ahead of us. What I have unfortunately realized thus far, is that no one in the history of the hospital has ever managed the surgical donations. There are boxes we have opened that were loaded onto a container 20 years ago and sent down, and set aside. Never opened, never organized, and definitely never used. There is no semblance of what is appropriate, or useful or practical.

I will share a really good example.

I picked up a box labeled "pulmonary valve conduit." Ha, that's interesting I thought and opened the box to find out what it really was... I was pure dumbfounded to hold in my hand a pulmonary valve conduit. In order to use this incredibly expense item (range of $7,500-$12,500 in the US according to Medtronic) would require open heart surgery involving cardio-pulmonary bypass, neither of which is physically or safely possible at Loma de Luz. In addition, from a storage perspective, grafts such as these are incredible sensitive and require climate control (range of 59 to 77 degrees F). It is currently May and the heat index is over 110 degrees F on a daily basis meaning these nonclimate controlled bodegas are likewise in excess of 110 degrees. So so so many questions. Why was this here? Who sent this here? And for what purpose?

As a mission hospital, we survive on donations and physically could not provide the care we are able to do without them. But it hurts to see supplies such as these, what someone, somewhere had ment has a blessing, literally turn to dust instead.

Hopefully with the work and dedication that Elizabeth is lending to this project, we can prevent similar mishaps in our donations and inventory in the future.

Much Love.

P.S. In the first picture Elizabeth and I are modeling T-shirts found in a rather large tote buried amongst the bodegas. Literally every color advertising the 1996 Georgia Blueberry Festival. They are going to make fantastic rags!