Physician Saves Lives With ‘Junk’
Amid the medical journals, patient files and orthopedics hardware cluttering Dr. Terry Mendelson’s Kaiser Permanente Medical Center office sits an array of baskets brimming with syringes, scissors and industrial-strength surgical supplies.
“Excuse the mess,” the 45-year-old Panorama City orthopedist said as he gingerly stepped around the medical supplies that were strewn around the office like discarded Tinker Toys. “This stuff pops up everywhere.”
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It’s not just a coincidence that boxes of new and recycled hospital supplies materialize in Mendelson’s office. Or that they fill one of the medical center’s garages.
As head of Kaiser Permanente’s Shared OverSeas, or S.O.S., program, the chief of orthopedics has made it his business to collect and ship unused operating-room supplies to developing countries.
“We’re taking what’s considered junk in this country and saving lives with it,” the West Hills resident said about the reported $200-million worth of unused surgical supplies disposed of in the United States every year. “I’m a natural pack rat, so when I read about this program, I knew it was for me.”
The organization that caught Mendelson’s attention is called Recovered Medical Equipment for the Developing World, or REMEDY. The Yale University School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital program, established in 1991, has salvaged more than $1.5 million in supplies and sent them to Eastern European and Latin American countries, Mendelson said.
Eager to involve other hospitals, the nonprofit group developed a protocol for helping interested medical centers develop their own programs to recover unused medical supplies for distribution overseas.
Yale researchers say that U.S. hospitals routinely discard about 2,000 tons of surgical supplies yearly, either outdated or discontinued instruments, or those that are clean, but no longer sterile.
“I used to cringe when I saw boxes of never-used surgical instruments head for the garbage,” Mendelson said.
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So in 1997, the Valley native initiated S.O.S., a REMEDY satellite program. After winning the approval of the medical center’s administrators, Mendelson met with nurses, doctors and other hospital personnel to explain which supplies should be tapped for recycling.
Once a week, Mendelson wheels the supplies--ophthalmological tools, sutures and sterile surgical “trays,” some worth $1,200--to a storage room at the medical center, where volunteers, including his wife, Lindy, and their teenage children, Brian and Lauren, prepare the supplies for shipping to the Albert Schweitzer Institute for the Humanities in Connecticut.
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The humanitarian organization then ships the supplies to Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and other countries.
“Dr. Mendelson is revered here as a wonderful man, dedicated to this program,” said Jonathan Weiss, Schweitzer’s REMEDY program coordinator. “He’s realized the humanitarian and environmental potential of this program.”
Mendelson’s Kaiser colleagues said that the volunteer program, which serves as a model for other Kaiser medical centers and has already donated about $250,000 worth of supplies, has transformed the participants.
“Dr. Mendelson is an example of what we want all Kaiser physicians to be,” said Dr. Virginia Ambrosini, area medical director at the Panorama City site. “He helps heal others, while he has expanded that concept to the outside world.”
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