Additional Opportunities

UNE students volunteer at Partners for World Health (PWH), sorting medical supplies both as individuals and often as groups. In addition, twice per year, students and faculty rely on Partners for World Health to gather hundreds of pounds of supplies to support the clinic operations during UNE’s Cross Cultural Immersion in Ghana Program.

Hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and doctors’ offices normally discard — in compliance with institution and/or government policies — a constant stream of medical supplies. Discarded items include thousands of pounds of sterile syringes, needles, tongue depressors, tourniquets, wound dressing supplies, sterile and non-sterile gloves, hygiene products, surgical gowns and an endless supply of plastic tubs, water pitchers and bedpans. Durable equipment such as crutches, wheel chairs and hospital beds in good condition are also regularly sent to landfills.

Now PWH provides Maine medical facilities the opportunity to save landfill fees and recycle these valuable items, from the simple and inexpensive, to the highly sophisticated and costly. Volunteers pick up the unused medical supplies and bring them to the PWH warehouse for sorting, cataloging, cleaning (if needed) and packaging.

In some cases, the supplies are organized into boxes and prepared for container shipment to underserved countries throughout the world. In other cases, items are packed into duffel bags to be hand-delivered in foreign lands by individuals traveling on mission trips or privately. PWH identifies responsible, local hospital representatives in foreign countries who assure the supplies reach deserving urban and rural hospitals and clinics.

PWH is an all-volunteer organization made up of people committed to saving and improving lives in developing countries and preserving our environment. All you need is that commitment and a few hours. Anyone can volunteer, as an individual or as part of a group.

Typical tasks include, but are not limited to:

• Opening incoming material in bags or boxes and macro-sorting the items into general category bins
• Micro-sorting general category bins into bins of same or similar items 
• Counting, bagging and labeling similar items 
• Combining several dissimilar but related items into "kits" 
• Packing counted and bagged items into boxes, sealing the boxes and labeling them for shipment 
• Cleaning plastic basins, bottles, etc. 
• Transferring like liquids to create full containers 
• General organizational tasks 
• Removing unsealed, damaged or expired items from the recovery stream

PWH also needs volunteers to collect and transport items on a regular basis from local medical facilities to the Scarborough, Maine, warehouse. To perform this task you will need the ability to lift bags weighing up to 30 pounds and to drive a mid-sized van/wagon or SUV.

You can participate in organized UNE volunteer outings, or on your own through the PWH's weekly open warehouse days.