Saving Lives One Global Link at a Time

Pittsburgh is a land of plenty, especially when it comes to medical equipment and supplies.

Last year when UPMC outfitted its hospitals with the latest in digital intravenous infusion pumps, it found itself with thousands of stainless steel IV poles that no longer served a useful purpose. At least not here.

Enter Global Links, a Pittsburgh non-profit and thriving enterprise that has turned hospital waste into a healing salve for developing countries. Today the retired IV poles are on route to Cuba, Guatemala and Jamaica where they will see many more years of useful service.  

This year Global Links celebrates 20 years as a successful medical relief operation. What began as a brainstorm by three friends--Kathleen Hower, Emily Solomon and Brenda Smith--at a kitchen table has grown into a massive, full-time overseas operation with nine partner countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

We started out storing stuff in our homes, says Hower, but then the floodgates opened up. Today Global Links is one of only a handful of organizations in the country, and the only in the region, that repurposes medical supplies and keeps them out of landfills.

Global Links works from two locations today, a large warehouse in Point Breeze and an administration center on Penn Avenue. "Our goal is to combine everything in one place," says Hower who serves as the operation's executive director. "We need to be with the warehouse so things can be more fluid."

Nearly every hospital in Southwestern PA works with Global Links. The operation has spread to surrounding cities as well: John Hopkins in Baltimore, MD, Sloan-Kettering in NYC and Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia. Pittsburgh trucking company, Pitt Ohio Express, donates space to help bring goods here from distant places.   

"We have a world class medical center here. It makes sense to reach out to areas that are some of the neediest places in the world," says Hower. "Hospitals really don't want to throw this stuff away."

UPMC Presby was the first hospital to sign on to donate products 20 years ago, recalls David Hargraves, director of strategic sourcing, logistics and distribution for UPMC. The relationship has grown from there.

"We give them access to gather the supplies and we know they will put them in a container for somewhere in the world where patients will benefit," says Hargraves. "There's such a direct connection that it increases our trust in the organization; it's not going into a black hole someplace. It's reducing our waste stream and improving patient care."

Every item that arrives is meticulously inspected, repaired, inventoried and catalogued. The headquarters is crammed with rows of shelves, boxes and barrels filled to the brim with nebulizers, sterile gauze, infant supplies. The Point Breeze warehouse is equally jammed with wheel chairs, walkers, crutches, filing cabinets and hospital furniture  waiting shipment.  

Angela Garcia is the deputy director, in charge of day to day operations, a monster of a job considering the scope of the inventory and the operation, which includes 19 full-time staff, part-timers and countless volunteers that file through each week.

Garcia estimates that volunteers alone logged 6,000 hours of service in 2008, packing 5,400 boxes that were shipped abroad. Volunteers include many local medical professionals who give their time to help identify and prepare the biomedical equipment and surgical instrumentation received.

The daily details of the operation are staggering. The non-profit estimates it has donated more than $160 million in goods to more than 70 countries since 1969, and there still aren't enough sutures, pediatric supplies and basic materials like gauze and linens and endotracheal tubes to go around.

Saving the supplies from incineration and the dump is a tremendous accomplishment, considering that an estimated 2,000 tons of unused surgical supplies worth $200 million are thrown away in this country every year. Emergency rooms in the U.S. toss out 2,000 tons of unused medical supplies worth over $200 million annually.

"The key is sending stuff that they can use that doesn't wind up in another trash heap someplace else," says Garcia.

When hurricanes devastated parts of Cuba earlier this year, Hower and two staff members flew in to help the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) assess the effectiveness of donations made in 2008 and determine needs moving forward. Global Links travels frequently to its locations to ensure that the right supplies get to the right place.

Not all our supplies can be used effectively, says Hower. For example, our hospital beds don't fit in many third world hospitals, they are too big and the people and hospitals are too small. Conversely, Global Links was able to provide a provincial hospital in Matanzas, Cuba, Pittsburgh's sister city, with endoscopy supplies and equipment that enabled it to open a new operating room for less invasive surgery.

"We created a service, a huge improvement in the way they are able to serve their patients," says Hower. These are places where patients are sleeping two to a bed and don't have the simplest things like clean linens. Too often patients must find, buy and bring their own medical supplies to receive care.

"The point I always try to make is we're not about shipping stuff, we're about improving healthcare where we're working," she adds. "The commitment to improve healthcare is a very serious one. Our mission is long term infrastructure rebuilding."

Captions: Kathleen Hower; the loading dock at Global LInks; Patti Skillin, program officer, Central and South America; Kathleen Hower with the visiting Cuban medical team (l to r Carmen Cuba, Ramon Villamil Martinez, Cesar Silverio Garcia, Daisy Garcia Gutierez, Alioth Fernandez Valle, Luis Orlando Rodriguez); the Global Links warehouse; Global Links staff (l to r Robin Checkley, Robb Griska, Dave Davis).

Photographs copyright Brian Cohen