Ed Newman enjoys his weekly drives, darting from hospitals in eastern Washington County to nursing homes on Ohio’s southern border. He sees it as a scavenger hunt: each stop is a chance to find a discarded piece of medical equipment.
“It’s too important not to salvage that,” Newman said.
Newman is the director of Rural Action’s medical donation program. Every week, he picks up vacant wheelchairs, unused hospital beds and crutches that have been collecting cobwebs and finds a home for them in southeast Ohio, where health care access is lacking.
Ohio’s Appalachian residents are more likely to lack health insurance than their urban counterparts. At the same time, there are fewer physicians providing care in these regions, according to the Health Policy Institute of Ohio.
Amid these disparities, a local nonprofit in Appalachian Ohio is encouraging residents to focus on what’s already in their community to bridge the gaps.
“We go in and see where the strengths of a community are and help them focus on those,” Newman said.
Repurposing equipment
On a February afternoon, Newman stopped at Meigs County Public Library, one of the program’s collection sites, to pick up boxes of medical equipment. Library employee Chelsea Poole pulled out a walker that looked almost brand new.
“This looks like a good one,” Poole said, passing the mobility aid to Newman.
Newman loaded the valuable find into the back of his van, already packed with an assortment of supplies. Instead of going to landfills, this discarded piece of medical equipment will go directly to a community member.
“We get all this really nice equipment from people who are well off and then we give that really nice stuff to people who don't have anything,” Newman said. “Instead of Robin Hood, they just give it to us.”
Rural Action’s medical donation program began in 2021, modeled after MedWish International, an organization that donates usable medical equipment overseas and locally in Cleveland.
Newman recognized that such a program could be a lifeline for people in rural Appalachian Ohio, where nearly 80% of counties are considered health professional shortage areas. Plus, fewer transportation options and limited broadband make it even more difficult to get care.
“There's a lot of people that don't have ready access to health care,” Newman said. “Some of the people we give stuff to are in a desperate situation and this changes that.”
Meeting a need
These gaps in health care access mean there’s high demand for items as small and inexpensive as bandages, to large pricier items like motorized wheelchairs, which can cost anywhere between $2,000 and $20,000.
He brought around eight of these chairs to the LIL Repair Shop in Athens County, where owner Dennis Jones takes this highly specialized equipment and fixes it at little or no cost for those in need.
“We had a gentleman who only had about six months to live and his insurance declined him on a chair. They didn't want to spend the money on it because it wouldn't be used long,” Jones recalled. “We were able to give him a chair. That gave him the ability to get around the nursing home and to be able to still play cards with everybody, go get his meals, make him more independent.”
That’s the strength of the program: It can’t foot the bill for a surgery, provide life saving medication or decrease the region’s high rates of chronic health conditions. But for people like Rachel Everett, it can provide comfort.
When she was recovering from knee surgery last year, she borrowed a hospital bed, a bedside commode and a walker from the program.
“It was a huge relief to have all of the equipment that I needed to heal and get well at home, without worrying about the financial hardship or logistics of getting what I needed,” Everett said.
Once she healed, Everett gave her equipment back to the program to help another community member.
Working together
With each donated brace, catheter or blood pressure monitor, Newman says word of the program’s benefits spread and their network grows. That’s important, he said, given Rural Action is one of the only organizations doing this kind of work in a rural region.
They’re organizing a summit this summer to connect nursing facilities, hospitals, waste districts and churches to develop a network of community members who recover medical equipment.
They’ll all come together to rally around a simple idea: Healing is a shared responsibility.
