MedEarth has donated much needed medical and surgical equipment to the Solomon Islands. Lara Garfinkel and co-founder Laura Taitz founded MedEarth in 2013 and it is the only charity in Australia that recovers unwanted usable medical supplies and equipment from hospitals and redistributes it to those who desperately need it. Lara adds, “This achieves our goal of protecting the environment whilst at the same time ensuring access to better health care for those in need in developing countries”. The warehouse is full of fully functioning medical supplies and equipment donated by hospitals in Sydney during upgrades or refurbishments. In the absence of MedEarth, these items would have been discarded as waste and ended up as landfill. The ECG machine seen in the foreground was particularly requested by Gizo hospital emergency department in the remote western province of the Solomon Islands, as their current ECG machine is quite dilapidated. With the aid of the Royal Australia Air Force (RAAF), DAISI and MedEarth, working in collaboration, will be able to transfer this much needed equipment to the Solomon Islands. For More information on MedEarth please visit www.medearth.org
Nili Hali is a child protection lawyer with the NSW Government with previous experience in international law and volunteer work, having completed a secondment at the United Nations in The Hague, The Netherlands and more recently the Solomon Islands. She offers legal advise and assists DAISI on an ongoing basis, and continues to visit the Solomon Islands frequently on medical outreaches.
