No rest for city’s old hospital beds
Amputees in Pakistan and patients in the Solomon Islands may soon be sitting on Wellington beds.
Fifty-one working hydraulic and electric beds, which have reached the end of their usable life for Capital and Coast District Health Board (CCDHB), have been diverted from landfill to Kiwi charity Take My Hands.
The group collects medical equipment and resources that can no longer be used in New Zealand and redistributes them to organisations that work with those in need in the Asia-Pacific region.
A container packed with 25 of the beds, 36 meal trolleys and two intravenous drip poles headed off last weekend, destined for the Hope Rehabilitation Society in Lahore, which specialises in artificial limbs, Take My Hands managing trustee Janette Searle said.
It’s likely the rest will end up in the Solomon Islands, where beds of any kind are in short supply, she added.
‘‘Some health clinics just do not have beds. They have patients on the floor. In paediatric departments, there are women who have just given birth who were in blankets on the floor.
‘‘It’s not about shoddy equipment; it’s that there’s no equipment.’’
CCDHB contracts manager Kenny McCaul said the move was part of the hospital’s new waste minimisation policy, which came out of a waste audit conducted last year.
‘‘We decided the traditional way of disposing of these beds wasn’t going to suit the way we wanted to operate as a DHB any more.’’
Most of the beds had a shelf life of about 10 years; after that, it became too hard to get parts for them, McCaul said. ‘‘They were past the age where they could operate in a hospital environment.’’
They were all in a working state when donated, which Searle said was important.
‘‘We don’t want our junk just to end up in their landfills.‘‘
On top of the donation to Take My Hands, the DHB had also given beds to propmakers and the Wellington Menzshed, where they were being used as portable workstations, he said.
‘‘You can get them to a decent height to be able to lean over a project and raise it up, so you’re not having to reach in the middle of something.’’
Some would have arrived with the regional hospital in 2008, while some were even older, McCaul said.
Searle said Take My Hands, officially established in 2012, was made possible by the help of transport and logistics companies as well as DHBs that no longer needed medical equipment.