Beds are taken out of a hospital within the Hospital Sisters Health System for donation to Hospital Sisters Mission Outreach. The system is giving the charity dozens of the beds, which are in turn being given to facilities in need of them elsewhere in the world.
Hospital Sisters Health System has donated 129 beds to Hospital Sisters Mission Outreach with more to come.
The Springfield, Illinois-based health system is standardizing its beds at all its hospitals. When the first project phase is finished, 190 beds taken out of service will be donated from HSHS St. Mary's Hospital in Green Bay, Wisconsin; and HSHS
St. John's Hospital in Springfield; HSHS St. Joseph's Hospital in Breese; HSHS Holy Family Hospital in Greenville; and HSHS St. Francis Hospital in Litchfield, all in Illinois.
Erica Smith, executive director of Mission Outreach, says hospital beds are the number one requested item. "I recently was in Uganda, and I saw a hospital where in the pediatric ward the children were on the floor recovering from surgery because there are no beds there," says Smith.
The beds from HSHS are already being shipped out to hospitals in other countries. "It's been a huge success," says Smith. "We had one example of beds that we got in Green Bay that were on a container to Tanzania within two weeks."