Student/Post-doc News

M-HEAL

On Saturday, March 29, members of M-HEAL joined World Medical Relief, Inc., to inventory the Detroit warehouse full of donated medical supplies. M-HEAL is a student group at Michigan composed of mainly BME graduate and undergraduate engineering students with a shared concern for global health disparities. Before this event, physicians from developing countries would wander the warehouse to select the items they needed for their clinics. The goal of the massive inventory project was to create a computerized database of every single item in WMR to make the whole operation more efficient and the equipment more accessible to those who need it. Stephen Dewitt, Annie Mitsak, Pratik Rohatgi, Julia Samorezov, David Turer, and Kristen Wolff, M-HEAL's officers, have worked tirelessly to accomplish this goal.

In just one year, M-HEAL has developed a very strong relationship with World Medical Relief, Inc., a private non-profit, multi-funded organization based in Detroit, Michigan. World Medical Relief exists exclusively for charitable purposes and seeks to relieve human suffering throughout the global community by collecting and distributing pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and recycled medical equipment. The staff works to supply low-cost prescription drugs and durable medical goods to impoverished individuals in the Detroit area, as well as provide medical supplies to international medical facilities. Approximately 100 shipments of medical goods are sent annually to hospitals in over 75 countries with the recipients of these items paying for only the cost of shipping. World Medical Relief is constantly receiving requests for supplies from international hospitals and the current list of most-asked for equipment includes: hospital beds, ventilators, fetal monitors, ultrasound machines, defibulators, operating tables, autoclaves, and ECG monitors. Such requests could not be met without the generous donations of local hospitals. When area hospitals such as Beaumont and St. John's undergo periodic equipment upgrades, they often call on World Medical Relief to pick up the discarded equipment. This is an environmentally-friendly, socially-conscious and tax-deductible method of recycling the hospitals' "outdated" equipment.

Two Saturdays each month, M-HEAL members join four volunteer medical technicians from Beaumont Hospital at World Medical Relief. Together they spend the morning testing and repairing donated medical devices. These technicians offer their expertise, teaching the University of Michigan students about the equipment, as well as effective validation procedures. Additionally, World Medical Relief has restored a large engineering validation room within its facilities exclusively for the use of M-HEAL members and is extremely excited about the work that the students are able to accomplish. World Medical Relief's Chief Operating Officer is enthusiastic about further building the World Medical Relief's relationship with the University of Michigan.

M-HEAL students also are working on a low-cost surgical lamp as their current design project. This lamp will be capable of operating with intermittent electricity, making it suitable for clinics in areas frequently plagued by power outages. A prototype is in development, and will be sent for testing with World Medical Relief members to the Philippines this summer. As part of the planning process for future design projects, M-HEAL members have created a survey of need to assess hospital and clinic conditions in developing nations. Several University groups have already taken these surveys on their medical aid trips to Cuba, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. The goal is to distribute the survey to as widely as possible, thus enabling M-HEAL to undertake relevant design projects that can make a real difference in the global community.

Posted on June 23, 2008, 9:25 am