Month: July 2018

by Kelly Rogge, KCKCC

Just last month, the Kansas City Kansas Community College Nursing Department received a generous donation from Olathe Medical Center – 13 Stryker 2 hospital beds. That donation enabled the department to replace its current equipment, giving students the opportunity to use beds they will encounter in the clinical setting.

However, in order to make room for the new equipment, KCKCC nursing faculty were left with a dilemma, what to do with the beds they no longer needed. They first thought to donate them locally, but thanks to a nursing instructor, they looked to a small hospital thousands of miles away that is in desperate need of quality medical supplies.

“The facility is not a large building, just one story,” said Matthias Ngewa, instructor in the KCKCC nursing program, of the facility in Kenya. “The floor units are not partitioned with walls. Instead curtains separate one patient from other.”

Ngewa arranged for the beds to be donated to Mbooni Sub County Hospital in Kikima Mbooni, Kenya., which currently uses metallic beds – a model that has existed since the late 1970s.

“Modern equipment will go a long way in improving basic care and comfort for the patients who visit the facility, mostly the poor,” he said about the donation. “We are helping to ensure that the local population sees and feels the kindness of people who are so far from them.”

KCKCC was able to replace the beds after Olathe Medical Center donated the equipment last month. Through the donation, KCKCC updated beds in the Simulation Center, Fundamentals/CNA/LPN/PTA Lab and the Lifespan Lab, where the department has its mother/baby simulations.

Susan Andersen, interim director of nursing at KCKCC, said the beds will make it possible for faculty members to familiarize students with the modern bed technology they will encounter in the clinical setting so that they can be better prepared to utilize the equipment and technology. Programs that benefited from the donation include the Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN), Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN), and Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) and Physical Therapist Assistant (PTA) programs.

CNA students are currently working with the new beds during the summer session. Andersen said they are “really excited to work with the new technology” as it will help them learn how to use the bed alarm feature to prevent falls and how to weigh a patient while still in the bed.

“We received a wonderful gift of hospital beds from Olathe Medical Center, which were an upgrade for us. Our current beds were fully functional, and we knew they could be of help to a healthcare facility,” Andersen said. “Our nursing instructor, Matthias Ngewa, was currently working with a hospital in Kenya to provide much needed hospital beds. We saw this as a perfect opportunity to reach out to another hospital and positively impact care of patients in that region. Matthias and our Building and Grounds Team worked very hard in gathering and loading our beds.”

Ngewa said it was important to facilitate this donation in order to help those less fortunate receive a higher level of medical care. Currently, the beds are waiting to be shipped along with other donations. Ngewa is working on collecting more hospital beds to donate.

“We were looking for donations of more beds, oxygen concentrators, suction machines, vital signs machines, bladder scanners, etc. – any equipment that can assist medical professionals in saving lives,” he said. “Most of them die going to seek for medical attention in hospitals which are in big towns, the nearest town with better equipment is about 44 miles away.”

For information on how to donate medical supplies to Mbooni Sub County Hospital, contact Matthias Ngewa at [email protected].