MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Eric Wan BS and Miceile Barrett BS Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Baltimore, MD Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Answer: Access to surgery is limited in resource-poor settings and low-and-middle income countries (LMICs) due to a lack of human and material resources. In contrast, academic hospitals in high-income countries often generate significant amounts of unused and clean medical supplies that cannot be re-used in the operating rooms of high-income countries. Programs such as Supporting Hospitals Abroad with Resources and Equipment (SHARE) provide an avenue for recovery of these supplies and donation to resource-poor hospitals in LMICs. From data collected from SHARE supplies donated by Johns Hopkins, we found that the nationwide impact for these programs to be $15.4 million among US academic hospitals, which accounts for only 19 categories of commonly recovered supplies. When we tracked our donated supplies to hospitals in Ecuador serving the poor, we found that the cost-effectiveness of these donations was US $2.14 per disability-adjusted life-year prevented. (more…)