(l-r) Chad Hodges, Hashmat Effendi and Patricia Brock packing medical supplies for shipment

Within one month, Dr. Patricia Brock saw an ad in a medical journal about donating supplies to charity, heard about a fellow physician’s medical mission to El Salvador and then accepted an unexpected invitation to join the next mission to the Central American nation. Dr. Brock remembers, “I saw the desperate need of the people. There’s so much illness and disease. And there are doctors, but there are just no supplies to take care of the people. We’re not talking about MRI machines and CT scanners. They don’t have bandages!”

Hospitals in many developing nations lack basic medical supplies such as IV tubes, syringes and sheets for beds, while in the United States enormous amounts of unused supplies routinely are thrown away. When Dr. Brock returned to Houston from El Salvador, she tried to find a way to send discarded, unused supplies to hospitals in developing nations, but no established program was available. She says, “Then I realized it was a no-brainer. The material I received when I responded to the ad described how to work with hospitals in recovering supplies that are discarded but still useful.

“Let’s say a patient is scheduled for gallbladder surgery and is the first case of the day. The hospital staff sets up the operating room the night before,” Dr. Brock explains. “If the patient wakes up the next morning with a fever and can’t have surgery, all the supplies that were laid out—gowns, gloves, syringes, needles, masks—are thrown in the trash. So we formed Medical Bridges Inc. four years ago and started approaching hospitals to get them on board with this program that was outlined in the material I had received.”

Dr. Peggy Goetz, a pediatrician and Medical Bridges board member adds, “We also get help from home health care agencies when patients are finished with aids like crutches or walking boots and from medical manufacturing companies that donate overages or supplies that are approaching their expiration date. All of that would have been thrown away.”

With one full-time staff member and numerous volunteer hours, in 2003 Medical Bridges sent 80 shipments of supplies—including 10 40-foot containers—to hospitals in 46 nations. Hashmat Effendi, who came to the United States from Pakistan in 1979, organizes medical missions that take doctors to treat indigent patients in developing nations. She says she “helps bring healing into third-world countries.” As a volunteer, she also oversees Medical Bridges shipments.

“We are planning to send a shipment to Egypt, and I will be the contact person between Medical Bridges and the hospital in Egypt,” explains Ms. Effendi. “I will visit the hospital and establish a relationship. I’ll make sure when we send the shipment that it gets through customs and is delivered properly to the hospital and that we get reports back. When I travel with a medical mission, I receive and set up all the supplies. The hospital staff is totally amazed when we use gloves just once and then throw them away because they have blood all over them. They are so desperate for supplies that they thoroughly wash the gloves and use them again.

“The most recent medical mission I took was to Pakistan, and they had nothing. We used everything we shipped, even the scrubs. The people we work with are struggling to live. They are in pain, they have deformities, they have medical problems and they look to us with hope. Even little things, like a sheet or a piece of gauze, make a difference, because these people are not accustomed to having medical supplies or receiving care and attention.”

Dr. Brock adds, “We’re also sending a positive impression of Houston and the United States through the people who are going there and by the things we’ve touched and packed that somebody who we’ll never see is going to use.” Program Director Chad Hodges says, “The Saturday after September 11, we had 15 young adults from a Presbyterian Church and 15 or so Pakistanis out here all working together to load a container. They weren’t worrying about anything. They were just working together with the common goal of helping other people.”

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