1. World Medical Relief Repair Trips

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 This is an environmentally-friendly, socially-conscious and tax-deductible method of recycling the hospitals’ “outdated” equipment.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. The COO is enthusiastic about further building the World Medical Relief’s relationship with the University of Michigan.

2. World Medical Relief Inventory Project

One of the major problems that WMR has is lack of an inventory system. Currently, physicians from developing countries must physically come to WMR and wander through the giant warehouse in order to select things that they need in their clinics. Our goal is 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. Considering the sheer magnitude of what needs to be inventoried, this is no easy task. We would like your help in acquiring the man-power to make this project a success. Volunteers must commit to Saturday, March 29 from 8am to 5 or 6pm, as well as an organizational meeting one week before the volunteer day. At this meeting, we will go over the logistics of the day including an overview of the inventory database and the procedure for recording each item. Transportation and lunch will be provided on the 29th.

3. Design Project: Surgical Lamp

Stories about international medical relief trips, provided by staff members at World Medical Relief, have also proven beneficial in helping M-HEAL members identify medical needs for potential design projects. The current project, the design of a low-cost surgical lamp capable of operating with intermittent electricity, was selected in this manner. A prototype is in development, and will be sent with World Medical Relief volunteers to the Philippines this summer for testing.

4. Survey of Need

M-Heal as written a short survey to better understand the clinical setting UM medical teams work in and its needs. From the survey we hope to identify several projects spanning the different spring break/summer sites UMMS students visit and hope to build solutions to those problems that can then be sent to the sites at subsequent trips. A long term goal we've started to become interested in is to develop social enterprises at sites visited by UM clinicians. We think that M-Heal could do and fund the R&D for medical projects that could then be built and sold locally.

You can download the survey here.