MedShare International

SHARING MEDICAL SUPPLIES CAN MAKE A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

Each day, over 5,000 tons of medical surplus materials are thrown into our landfills, but one organization, MedShare International, is providing a socially responsible and cost effective way to deal with surplus medical supplies that helps save lives around the world.

MedShare International is a nonprofit organization that collects surplus medical supplies and equipment from hospitals, medical manufacturers and individuals to redistribute to qualified healthcare institutions in the developing world. 

“We want to take our surplus that would be going into our local landfills, and put it into the hands of doctors and nurses around the world who do not have access to these resources,” said A.B. Short, Co-founder and CEO of MedShare.

MedShare is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia with a Western Distribution Center in San Leandro, California.  Each month, over 700 volunteers come through MedShare to help sort, label and pack the thousands of pounds of medical supplies collected each week.

The supplies are then entered into our online inventory database, where the qualified healthcare recipients can customize their supply shipment.  This ensures that each recipient gets only the supplies the facility needs, and nothing goes to waste.

Often these supplies are picked up at MedShare by medical mission teams that travel to impoverished clinics in the developing world.  For example, a team of medical professionals from 6 different states recently traveled to Niger, a country in West Africa, taking with them 423 pounds of medical supplies.  Some of the supplies were used during their trip, and the excess supplies were donated to the National Hospital and the rural clinics where these medical professionals worked.

“The people at the National Hospital were blown away by all the surgical tools that we brought for their facility,” said Amy Williams, director of the LINK Niger team.

Lines of men and women with babies waited for hours each day to be treated by the medical team, and some days they saw over a thousand patients.  One morning began with Dr. Cindi Martin, OB/GYN, delivering a baby at the village clinic.

“We used the supplies to treat many individuals with malaria, typhoid fever, worms, boils, and other common infections.  An 11-year-old boy stole our hearts, when he came in with a huge abscess on his neck.  He literally could not move his little neck, so we immediately used our supplies to operate on the abscess, and treated the wound daily after that,” said Amy Williams, director of the medical team.

Since its inception 10 years ago, MedShare has equipped over 900 medical mission teams with supplies.

Visit MedShare International's Web Site