Developing countries need medical supplies. The United States has supplies that we don’t use or would otherwise dispose of. How can these two situations be connected, for the benefit of everyone?
Meet SHARE (Supporting Hospitals Abroad with Resources and Equipment).
As its site explains, SHARE is “a group of medical students and health care professionals… who collects unused but clean medical supplies from the operating room and redistributes the instruments to developing nations.”
SHARE has been busy lately. For example, at this year’s Undergraduate Conference in Public Health, the JHU chapter of SHARE had a poster entitled Global Public Health Impact of Recovered Supplies from Operating Rooms: A Critical Analysis with National Implications. The students searched PubMed to find information about the topic of medical supplies and developing countries. PubMed’s amazing MeSH headings helped them to do that – for example, there is a MeSH heading for “developing countries” and one for “equipment and supplies.”
Interested in finding more information on these topics? Try all of our databases for Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health. And, make them find what you want them to find by doing things such as:
- putting some of your search words in the TITLE
- putting an asterisk at the end of a word so that ALL possible endings are retrieved (for example, medicin* retrieves medicine, medicines, medicinal)
- using synonyms (supplies OR surplus)
- using choices of words (cat OR dog OR bird) so that you don’t miss any articles
Congratulations to SHARE and its excellent work!