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Essential Hospitals Aid Countries Struck by Natural Disaster

Essential Hospitals are committed to advancing public health. While that often means taking care of the community in their backyard, sometimes, it means taking care of a community across the globe. The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) has worked with the Afya Foundation since 2008 to meet critical humanitarian needs in countries destroyed by natural disaster and address chronic health disparities in these countries by donating medical supplies.

Through the Foundation, HHC and other organizations donate opened or unopened, uncontaminated equipment and supplies, such as x-ray and ultrasound machines, IV starter kits, operating room tables, gauze, and medical carts. Hospitals often donate supplies when they close or are reorganizing departments. The supplies are especially critical to already vulnerable countries, as in the case of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti or the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Hospitals such as HHC have helped the Foundation accomplish the following since 2007:

  • ship and airlift more than $26 million worth of medical and humanitarian supplies to 53 countries in the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, and Asia
  • divert more than six million pounds of medical and humanitarian supplies from American landfills and waste incinerators to countries in need
  • treat more than 4,500 patients in clinics in Port au Prince, Haiti, since the 2010 earthquake
  • ship abroad more than 150 containers, each carrying between 20,000 and 40,000 pounds of supplies

Does your hospital do similar work to help other countries in times of disaster? Share with us in the comments below.

 

 

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