Atlanta Journal Constitution - The surgical team volunteers from WellStar Kennestone Hospital, dressed in scrubs, arrived about 9 a.m., stuffed their hands into pistachio-green latex gloves and picked up knives, scalpels and retractors.
Most days, these nurses and technicians show up to work in the OR, but Saturday morning, about a dozen turned up at a cavernous warehouse in Decatur to sort through piles of stainless steel surgical instruments.
Some of it was "stuff we're not used to seeing," said Melinda Vance as she sifted through supplies with fellow surgical technician Rachel Martin. "And they're all reusable," Martin said.
With their expertise, the Kennestone surgical volunteers are helping MedShare International, which sends surplus hospital supplies to developing countries, into a new, more technical area. They are setting up a system that will enable MedShare to send surgical trays to needy hospitals in addition to the millions of dollars' worth of disposable surgical supplies and equipment it sends.
"This group responded very enthusiastically," said A.B. Short, co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit MedShare. "We haven't had this detailed sorting process."
About 15 hospitals in metro Atlanta regularly donate surplus medical supplies to MedShare. And while it's fairly easy to find volunteers to help sort usable disposable supplies — sutures, needles, alcohol swab sticks, surgical masks — stacks of donated stainless steel surgical instruments have piled up for a lack of volunteers who know the tools.
Candy Pierce, a surgical nurse at Kennestone in Marietta, decided to put a group together to help out.
Useful categories
The Kennestone volunteers went through pallets of all types of surgical instruments for three hours Saturday and helped categorize them at MedShare's new 48,000-square-foot warehouse in Decatur, which is not yet fully operational. The nonprofit MedShare, founded in 1998, is still moving from a smaller facility in Lithonia.
"We're trying to figure out what some of these instruments are," said nurse Karen Claugus as she sorted through a bin of surgical tools.
The goal is to create surgical trays specific to different procedures that can be sent to hospitals and clinics in the developing world. The stainless steel tools can be sterilized and used over and over.
The MedShare warehouse has a small room designed by Georgia Tech industrial engineering strudents for classifying surgical instruments in as much detail as possible. At one end of the room are large bins with labels that read "scalpels," "speculums," "knives," etc. Nearby are smaller bins that classify the instruments more narrowly, such as 4-inch needle holders.
On Saturday, Pierce created a system to classify the instruments by surgical specialty. With an orange marker she wrote "Ortho," "Neuro," "Laparascopy" and other labels on sheets of white paper and taped them up.
