Transcription of Elizabeth McLellan, founder and president of Partners for World Health for the show Love Maine Radio #308: Elizabeth McLellan + Robert Atkinson
Dr. Lisa B: My next guest is Elizabeth McLellan who is the founder and president of Partners for World Health and who has spent her career working in nursing and healthcare administration. Thanks so much for coming in.
Elizabeth M: It’s great to be here.
Dr. Lisa B: Partners for World Health. You’ve been doing a lot of work over the last 10 years. Talk to me about your organization and what you are doing.
Elizabeth M: Partners for World Health is an organization that I started in 2007 collecting discarded medical supplies from hospitals here in the Portland area. In about a year and a half, I had about 11,000 pounds of discarded medical supplies located in my house before I moved it to its first warehouse. Our mission is to collect the discarded medical supplies and reprocess them, repackage them and then, ship them to various hospitals and clinics in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In addition, we also run medical missions in Bangladesh, Uganda, Senegal, Cameroon, and Turkey to take care of the Syrian refugees.
Dr. Lisa B: You’ve been working in this area, in the Portland area, for quite some time. How did you get involved with world health? Why did this show up on your radar screen?
Elizabeth M: Well, I spent many years living in the Middle East working in Saudi Arabia for the Arab-American Oil Company, in nursing administration there. I had the opportunity to travel all over northern Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and visited hospitals and met various people in the healthcare industry, only to realize that they didn’t have any medical supplies or not enough medical supplies. I decided, when I came home, that I was going to begin that effort of carrying them and acquiring them and then, packing them up in my suitcases and traveling two or three times a year to different places in the world to deliver these supplies. One thing led to another and when I was working in nursing administration at Maine Medical Center, I decided to start collecting them and just put a few bins out at various units and one thing’s led to another so that now, we have four warehouses here in the state of Maine and one coming onboard in Burlington, Vermont for the University of Vermont Medical Center. It’s really grown.
Dr. Lisa B: You also spend a lot of time working with nursing students, students in the allied health professions, so it’s not just bringing the supplies over, you’re actually bringing people over with you.
Elizabeth M: Well, in our medical mission program, we bring doctors, nurses, nursing students, medical students, and other healthcare professionals to provide either surgery or primary healthcare or community-wide education. Predominantly, our workforce at Partners for World Health is a volunteer effort. I’m a volunteer, I’m not paid for anything. We have a bookkeeper for 15 hours a week, that’s the only, currently, the only paid employee. We’re hoping to hire, in the next couple of months, a program director for our distribution center which is where most of the small things come in like bandages and dressings and catheters and needles and syringes and also hire a volunteer coordinator so that we can expand our workforce. We could use 25 volunteers a day, five days a week in order to process all the medical supplies that are coming in from all over the state of Maine, from New Hampshire, Vermont and five hospitals in Boston.
Dr. Lisa B: These medical supplies, even though they’re technically used, they’re not really used. There’s a lot of waste that actually takes place within the medical system.
Elizabeth M: Right. Our other warehouse here in Portland, we have two locations, one on Canco Road which is our shipping center and that’s the place where all of the beds, the wheelchairs, the walkers, the crutches, all of the biomedical equipment are stored. For example, EKG machines, defibrillators, anesthesia machines, incubators may have been used but they have an extended life. We have them checked by our volunteer biomedical people to make sure that they’re in good working order before we ship them. Other medical supplies can come in that have never been used that might still be in the original package like dressing supplies and Foley catheter supplies and many other items that are in the package. Some items are coming in like adult diapers that might have been opened but only one or two were used and then, the rest are still in the package so we have to go through everything to reprocess it and repackage it to make it acceptable for shipping.
Dr. Lisa B: Are there different regulations that you have to deal with depending upon the countries that you’re sending things to?
Elizabeth M: Yes, there are many, many regulations depending upon the country. For example in Uganda, to ship a medical container 40 feet long that would hold about 12,000 pounds of medical supplies involves a pre-inspection here in the United States. In addition, you have to change all the electrical cords, put an adaptor on them and provide a mini-transformer for every electrical piece of equipment. We ship a container load of 12,000 to 15,000 pounds once a month out of Portland, out of our shipping center and the next one leaves tomorrow on the 21st of June to head for Syria.
Now, Syria doesn’t really require a pre-inspection, also doesn’t require that transformers be sent but a variety of different regulations are implemented in different countries, all depending on what their rules and regulations are. Predominantly, most of them require that you do not send expired items so we have to check all of the items that come in.
For example, a four –by-four gauze could have an expiration date on it of August, 2016 and that means in our reality, in the United States, in our healthcare system, that is expired and we cannot use it. What we do is take it out of the package and then, repackage it in a zip lock bag and send it as non-sterile gauze. We always try to find another alternative way of repackaging it and sending it so that it doesn’t end up in the dump. If you were to come in and visit our distribution center which is at 40 Walch Drive, you would see a huge space of 15,000 square feet of boxes and bags of medical supplies that have been discarded from nursing homes, hospitals, private individuals and all of that needs to be reprocessed.
Dr. Lisa B: What is it about your background in nursing administration that made you so interested in the logistics of this process?
Elizabeth M: Well, there are many logistics in this process and it’s not anything that I learned while I was in nursing school or graduate school, absolutely nothing. It’s really been learning by the seat of your pants and trying to figure it out which is something that we do learn in nursing school which are three very valuable words: Figure it out. We’ve managed to do that and I’ve managed to do that over the past several years. My big interest, especially when I lived in the Middle East and did all those traveling, was to try to figure out how you can make a difference in other people’s lives. This is one way to do it and also save our environment at the same time. All of the items that are located in our warehouses are basically considered trash and they would have all hit the landfill. We can have a major impact on improving our environment and then doing the right thing which is to provide services and something that will help to make a difference in people’s lives especially those people that are less fortunate than we are.
Dr. Lisa B: You’ve received multiple awards from organizations and the community including The Hanley Center Leadership and Humanitarian Relief Award in 2010, the Red Cross Real Hero Award in 2011, the Outstanding Non-Profit Award in 2012, the Northeastern University Social Impact Award in 2014 and the Patriots Myra Kraft Community Service Award more recently. There are a lot of people who are paying attention to the work that you’re doing, has it enabled you to expand to the extent that you would like to?
Elizabeth M: Well, those awards, first of all, that I may have received are, really, they’re not for me. They’re really for all of the volunteers that have spent thousands of hours making this whole organization, Partners for World Health, succeed. I could never have done this without all of them. Last year alone, we had over 25,000 volunteer hours that were documented, let alone all the thousands of hours of donation that people made that were never documented. Those awards were absolutely wonderful, thank you very much to all of those great organizations that talked about our accolades and supported us but really, we need to remember that the success of this organization is because of all the volunteers from young to old that have dedicated many hours.
In reality, these awards have brought to a lot of attention to us, a lot of attention to Partners for World Health and they’ve helped to increase our volunteers, the number of volunteers. People sign-up on the website with a volunteer application and then they come in for an orientation and they’re absolutely, totally surprised about the volume of medical supplies and all of the different things that we can do. Many times, these awards have brought attention to other major donors that have helped to support us from a financial perspective. That’s our biggest challenge is, as it is for many non-profits, to find enough money, to raise enough money at an annual appeal, to find grants that would offer support from transportation of these containers and also, to find individuals that might want to make a major contribution that could help.
A major contribution would be a big deal to Partners for World Health because it would allow us to hire a few more people, we need to five to six full-time employees in order to make this hum and we’re not there yet. Partly, it’s because of the need for financial contributions. If someone wanted to make another huge donation, we would be able to send two containers a month to, especially, to countries that are not able to raise the funds to pay for the processing and shipping fees. For example, Malawi which is one of the poorest countries in Africa and one of the poorest countries in the world is in dire need of simple, basic medical supplies. We have everything that they could need, however, they have no source of funding so if someone could come to the forefront and help to provide a donation for transportation and processing fees, that would be a big help.
Dr. Lisa B: Well, from your lips to, if people believe in a god, God’s ear, how does that sound? We’ll see if people who are listening …
Elizabeth M: That sounds great.
Dr. Lisa B: Yeah, so let’s see if people who are listening can come forward and make this possible for you. Where did you grow up, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth M: I was born in Maine and grew up in Camden. Yeah, with a great family. Two brothers and two sisters and a father who was a physician, anesthesiologist up there, Pen Bay Medical Center, and a mom who was a nurse.
Dr. Lisa B: You have this medical background almost in your DNA, I guess. What types of things did you learn from your parents when you were growing up about the need to care for other people?
Elizabeth M: Well, the need to make a difference in other people’s lives and to help those less fortunate was instilled in us a long time ago. I can remember at Christmas time, wrapping up Christmas presents with my mother and dropping them off at various houses in the Camden-Rockport area especially for those individuals who are far less fortunate than we were. Also, there was something my father always said at nighttime at the end of grace which was, “Keep us ever mindful of the needs and wants of others,” and that has stuck with me my whole life.
Dr. Lisa B: Why did you decide to become a nurse?
Elizabeth M: Well, that’s because my mother wanted me to be a nurse. I graduated from college in Washington D.C. and moved to Boston and was working in a retail store in the Boston area and my mother didn’t like that idea of her daughter selling jewelry for the rest of her life. She managed to pull a few strings and I entered nursing school that fall and finished a couple of years later. I am a nurse because of my mother and actually it was a very good decision on her part because it’s offered me incredible opportunities, first of all, to make a difference in people’s lives here in the United States but also, to learn about the world and different cultures and to make a difference in so many other people’s lives. Nursing is a profession that can take you anywhere, whether it’s here in this country or anywhere in the world, so I really would advocate and talk to anybody about how great it would be for them to become a registered nurse.
Dr. Lisa B: What are some of your favorite memories involving Partners for World Health? Specifically, the people that you’ve met.
Elizabeth M: Well, a really recent memory was on our medical mission to Bangladesh. We do a surgical and primary healthcare medical mission each year in March and we’ve been going there for the past seven years. In one of our primary care settings which is in the Tangail Brothel in Bangladesh, about two hours outside of Dhaka, the capital, where 950 sex workers live with their children. These are women and children that have been trafficked or women that have been born in the brothel, that have stayed in the brothel as sex workers and ended up raising their children there. We arrived this year, this was our fourth primary care mission in the brothel and we were welcomed by 150 of the sex workers who were cheering and singing when we came through the doors into this brothel area. It was really quite emotional to see all of them there.
We are their only source of healthcare, they can go to the hospital during the year, however, they’re ostracized so many times. When we show up, it’s just a welcome, a big huge welcome, by all of them for us and it really meant a lot for us to be there. It meant a lot that they so much appreciated us coming. There had been other instances where we have definitely made a difference in people’s lives only because we just happened to go. One of those instances was in Senegal last year when we were in a primary care clinic that we were running outside of Dakar, about three hours in the desert inland in the country, in remote areas where we provide primary healthcare services. This particular clinic was the first one, in this site, was the first one we have ever done.
A five-year-old, little deaf girl came into the clinic. She has never had a hearing test so there was no way that we would know whether or not she had the ability to hear and there was no way that she was ever going to go to school unless we could figure out how to have a hearing test and put her in a deaf school located in the capital in Senegal. This year, we’re now in the process. We raised a little bit of money and found some people over in Senegal that can help support this young girl and they’re taking her to have her hearing test next month which is pretty exciting. If she can hear or has some way of hearing, then we can help her with the hearing aids and then, she’ll be able to go to the deaf school. Otherwise, she would have spent the rest of her life living in this little, thatched hut in a rural village never having the opportunity to learn anything or communicate with anyone. That’s pretty exciting to be able to make a difference in somebody’s life just because we showed up.
It was just by chance that we ran into her that day. There are lots of stories like that, lots of stories. The medical supplies make a big difference too because if you think about what doctors and nurses have to do and how they perform their jobs, you need sutures, you need scissors, you need cast material, you need dressings, you need bandages in order to put people back together again. If you don’t have your supplies, then doctors and nurses aren’t able to do their jobs. Collecting all of these medical supplies that are going to be discarded, that’s fine, we’ll be happy to try to figure out how to give them another use especially for those people. There are so many of them in our world that are less fortunate.
We also do a lot with big, local give back program. We provide personal care items, we provide diapers and briefs, food pantries to homeless shelters here in the Portland area, Augusta and Bangor. One of my retired nurse colleagues is very much into our local give back program and has contacted a variety of different agencies and pantries, etc. that have come down to pick up truckloads of items that we’re willing to give them for free so that they can take them out and donate them or give them back to people in the community. In addition, this nurse by the name of Marie Keller, has been known to stop on the side of the road with cans of Ensure and protein drinks and give them to the people that are standing there asking for money instead of giving them a dollar, giving them cans of nutritious drinks for them to drink which I think is just terrific. I need a photograph of that happening in Portland, Maine of her handing out these cans of Ensure out of her car window to all the homeless people.
Dr. Lisa B: How do you find the people that need you? How do you find the people that are looking for supplies in Bangladesh, say, or primary care or even the people that need the help that you offer here in Maine through the give back program?
Elizabeth M: The first people that I contacted initially to see of their interest in receiving medical supplies were people and organizations that I met when I was living in the Middle East and traveling. Those were the first people. Now, what happens is that individuals and organizations find out about us through the website. Really, predominantly through the internet and the website when they type in looking for medical supplies and Partners for World Healthy might popup in there in the search engine.
Then, other individuals like refugees and other people that have immigrated from different parts of the world to the United States and who live here in Maine or in Massachusetts want to do good for their own country and so, they’ve contacted us and have asked that we provide a container of medical supplies to them. For example, a church group in Massachusetts supports a physician who lives in Monrovia, in Liberia who visited here several months ago.
They’re helping to raise the funds for the shipping and processing fees for a full container for her 25-bed facility which is one of the only hospitals that remained opened during their Ebola crisis. This physician in Liberia is very dedicated to helping the people in her country especially the poor people to provide services so it’s those kind of individuals that find us and contact us. Sometimes it’s me doing a little investigating on the internet or hearing about other organizations like orphanages.
Once somebody started an orphanage, then kids get sick. Eventually, there’s a clinic that will popup very near to an orphanage and then that clinic will need or that small hospital will need beds and other different types of medical supplies to take care of these children. We have a lot of requests coming in. In fact, we could ship 20, 40 full containers, right now, if we have the funding to ship them and we have 20 places where we could send them to. That could rattle off a list of people and organizations that need these items.
Dr. Lisa B: What about the people that are needing primary care, for example, how do you find out about them?
Elizabeth M: Primary care in Africa or… ?
Dr. Lisa B: Primary care services in general.
Elizabeth M: Overseas?
Dr. Lisa B: Yes.
Elizabeth M: Part of what we do with a container program is that if you’re interested in a container, then we ship a container. We usually try to follow up with a medical mission following the shipping of the container, not when the container arrives but at some point in the following year. We’ll try to work in a medical mission like we want to be able to go to Liberia and help this woman out. With the services that we would provide, because it’s a small place, we probably wouldn’t do surgery but we would do primary healthcare. We would work with those partners that we would identify and tell them that we’re bringing nurse practitioners or primary care docs, other nursing professionals to run a primary care clinic and then they would put the word out and find the patients. When people know that you’re coming, there’ll be 400 people lined up on the first day because people will put the word out. For example, we implemented the project this year in Senegal when we were there in May called Project Ten Thousand.
The goal is to interview 10,000 pregnant women in different countries in Africa and provide education and training to the women on the complications of pregnancy because none of them are given any prenatal care. They don’t understand what could possibly happen to them when these complications occur so they wait until it’s too late which would result in their death or the death of their child. After they’re finished with the education, we give them their own birthing kit full of items that they would ordinarily have to purchase before they go into labor to take to the midwife. We’ve saved all those items, from the dump here, and we packaged them all up and we actually give them everything that they need to have a normal delivery. We interviewed 350 pregnant women in Senegal and we’ve partnered with three nurse midwives from three different facilities who will follow up in four to seven months with all of these pregnant women to determine the outcome. To see if they did develop complications and if they did, did they go immediately to the hospital?
This will help to look at the maternal mortality rate and the infant mortality rate in different places in Africa. We’re heading back to Uganda on a medical mission in August, August 25th. We have 13 people going with us and we’re taking nursing students from Kaplan University and five other RNs along with a couple of non-medical people. We could take a few more nurses if anyone is interested in participating. During that medical mission, we will work at two hospitals providing primary health care, doing nursing education for nurses and nursing students in NICU on how to take care of the critically ill baby, as well as interview 500 pregnant women for Project Ten Thousand. This is something that the students have been involved with from the beginning, making the supplies, writing the power points on what are the complications of pregnancy and they will be the ones, also with nursing supervision, providing the education to these pregnant women. It’s a real, total give back from start to finish. It’s pretty exciting so stay tuned. We still have 9,000 more people to go.
Dr. Lisa B: I’m sure that you’ll all be able to reach your goal because I’m impressed with all the work that you’ve been able to put into this and the goals that you’ve already met over the last 10 years.
Elizabeth M: Right, thank you very much.
Dr. Lisa B: I’ve been speaking with Elizabeth McLellan who is the founder and president of Partners for World Health and who has spent her career working in nursing and healthcare administration. Thank you so much for all the work you do and for taking the time to talk with me today.
Elizabeth M: It’s been a pleasure, thank you for having me.