Over the course of the morning, five pallets of donated medical supplies from Hospitals throughout Wisconsin were broken down and sorted into stations representing 12 situational categories from Front Line EMT & Emergency Room, to Surgical, Wound Care, Rehab, PPE, and others. At each of those stations, those supplies, along with others staged from previous efforts were further sorted by volunteers with medical experience into dozens of subcategories such as catheters, suture kits, central lines, wound care, ECG Electrodes, and so on.
Layperson volunteers at each station boxed the supplies according to subcategory and loaded them into Gaylords (giant cardboard crates). Shipping manifests were attached to the Gaylords and they were moved to an outbound shipping area.
Through the hard work of UMANA member Anya Verkhovskaya, these Gaylords will be shipped through Gdansk, Poland to Lviv, Ukraine. In Lviv, there are even more volunteers, working long hours in a cramped and bomb-damaged warehouse, often in cold and low light. These people will partition the boxes of specific supplies into carefully configured shipments to hospitals, clinics, front-line aid stations, and even combat medics. Then still more volunteers – some braving direct small arms and artillery fire, will transport these supplies to their destinations where they will be put to work saving lives.
High-criticality and high-value donations such as procedural equipment, pain and anesthetic medications, wound vacs and surgical instruments are packaged into suitcases, and “mules,” people who are traveling to Ukraine, carry them directly and much more quickly, to the volunteers in Lviv. UMANA has shipped hundreds of suitcases full of such supplies.
At a shift changeover assembly, we were informed that in typical warfare, for every three people wounded, one dies. Due in small part to our efforts – and with a very humble nod towards the inspiring performance of their military, for Ukrainians, that figure improves to only one death per seven wounded.
Today, we packaged about nine tons of supplies. The entire effort in Wisconsin has sent over 80 tons and the parent effort, centered in Illinois, has collectively sent about 350 tons of supplies. The need is immense, and the effort will go on.
