Mission Donation Program
Did you know that hospitals in the U.S. produce approximately 42 pounds of waste per patient day? Without the proper programming in place, all of that waste ultimately ends up in landfills. One of the programs we have in place at Carilion Clinic is the Mission Donation program.
Mission Donation Program
Our Mission Donation program gives supplies a second chance at life by providing a process for unopened and uncontaminated supplies that cannot be returned to inventory to be donated for distribution across the globe for use by those in extreme poverty as well as those facing the aftermath of natural disasters. Participating units have a collection bin in which they place items to be donated. Sustainability department team members empty these bins on a regular basis and then pack and ship donated items to our partner, Gleaning for the World. This program helps reduce perfectly good supplies from being disposed of. Contact Marina Sotelo if you need a bin for your unit.
Read more about a success of this program here: https://www.insidecarilion.org/hub/news/how-we-diverted-151000-pounds-from-landfills
Mission Fund Program & Policy
The Mission Fund program is for individuals or groups to request funding for short-term mission projects. The trip must:
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Be devoted to direct patient care, and
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Involve Carilion Clinic providers and/or staff
For more information on how to apply for funding, please see the documents under the "Mission Donation" section of the Resources page.
Mission Donation Program History
In their roles as R.N.s at CRMH, Temple Newbold, a clinical research specialist in Geriatrics, and Sara Wohlford, Sustainability, wanted to understand how much clean, unused medical supplies contributed to this waste. They wanted to find out if a better approach to throwing supplies away was possible. Temple and Sara kicked off a two-month pilot project to collect clean, unopened, uncontaminated product that would normally be thrown away from four nursing units at CRMH. This provided data to estimate that at CRMH in 2015, over seven tons (14,447 pounds) of unused, uncontaminated medical supplies from floor stock and Pyxis towers would end up in our landfills.
Temple and Sara developed a process that was implemented hospital-wide at CRMH in early 2016. The first step was educating nursing units on only taking necessary items from Pyxis supply towers to patient rooms and returning anything that isn't used and can be returned. Unused supplies that can't be returned are still usable in other settings, such as for employee education efforts, mission trips that employees take and for international aid organizations. Because of the volume, the collecting, sorting and boxing of supplies for donation became quite a challenge, so Temple and Sara reached out to Human Resources for their staffing ideas. Human Resources recommended involving students from Project Search, a program that provides education and on-site training to youth with disabilities to prepare them for work after graduation from high school.
"We could not have done it without the dedicated students, who proved to be invaluable in getting the donation program underway and making it a success," said Sara.
Environmental Services provided a space at CRMH for the group to collect, sort and box the supplies. Other crucial partnerships included Materials Management, particularly the Warehouse, which picks up supplies once they've been boxed and stores them until they can be picked up by Gleaning for the World, the project's main international aid donation and distribution partner
In 2016, the first year of the program at CRMH, thousands of pounds of supplies and equipment were saved from the landfill and instead were distributed. The program was such a success, it is still running in CRMH today.
