DukeMed Alumni News
Fall 2007

New Surplus Program
Changes Lives with Donated Equipment

Each year, millions of dollars worth of medical equipment and supplies at Duke University Health System hospitals must be set aside for a variety of legal, regulatory, or logistical reasons.

A new program, administered by the Duke Global Health Institue and called Global Health PLUS, is making the surplus available to health care professionals around the world. (PLUS stands for Placement of Life-Changing Usable Surplus.)

One Duke physician who has recently capitalized on the new opportunity is associate professor of neurosurgery Michael Haglund, MD, PhD. Last January, Haglund traveled to Kampala, Uganda and says he was astounded to see doctors “performing brain surgery with equipment that looked like what was used at Duke in the 30s and 40s.

“When they anesthetize patients, they have to hand bag—have people squeezing a bag of oxygen to help a person breathe,” says Haglund. “They don’t have plates to hold skull flaps in place, so people who have had brain surgery often have grotesque swelling of their heads…In the orthopedic operating room, they still use ether…by mid-afternoon…doctors and nurses are beginning to faint from the fumes.”

Haglund returned to Duke and completed the application process with GH PLUS. In August he and a Duke neurosurgical operating room team returned to Kampala with more than $1 million worth of equipment and donations— including 14 ventilators, eight anesthesia monitors, two operating microscopes, seven complete anesthesia monitors, 1,000 plating systems for bone flaps, 10 oxygen saturation monitors, seven automatic blood pressure monitors, and 31 transport heart monitors.

“I often was not aware of what was being replaced in the OR,” says Haglund. “Through GH PLUS I found out about defibrillators coming from Durham Regional Hospital, critical care monitors from Duke Raleigh Hospital, and more.”

During their trip, Haglund and team helped set up a modern operating room and performed dozens of brain and spinal cord surgeries. Haglund also obtained educational grants from Synthes Spine and the Integra Foundation to pay for a Ugandan clinical engineer to receive eight weeks of training in surgical equipment maintenance in Ghana, the closest place where such training is offered. With the new equipment, Ugandan neurosurgeons will now be able to participate in a new training program through the Foundation for International Education in Neurosurgery. Haglund will serve as co-director of the Ugandan training program.

It is not often you get the opportunity to change how an entire country practices medicine,” says Haglund. “With the gift of this material and training, we can and will change how neurosurgery is practiced in East Africa.”

According to Duke Global Health Institue director Michael Merson, MD, GH PLUS fulfills a key part of the institute’s mission.

“We want not only patients in our local community to receive the best care, but also those living in underserved areas throughout the world,” says Merson. “GH PLUS gives us the opportunity to do this while at the same time expanding Duke’s growing international presence.”

Duke faculty, staff, students, or Duke-affiliated physicians in the community can apply for equipment, supplies, and support for projects to improve health in developing countries.

GH PLUS is one part of the larger Duke SurPLUS Program, which since 1997 has operated as a retail store. The retail store was closed at the end of June, and the surplus program has been redesigned to coordinate the donation of furniture, computers, and other property to charities and nonprofit organizations and medical equipment to global health projects through GH PLUS. (Used medical equipment and supplies cannot be used in the local community due to government safety regulations.)

For more information about GH PLUS, visit http://globalhealth.duke.edu. For more information about the Duke Surplus Program, visit www.procurement.duke.edu.