Blueprint for Medical Supply Access in the Greater Los Angeles Community

County of Los Angeles

Around the world, millions suffer from treatable health conditions due to a lack of access to basic medical supplies. Meanwhile, the U.S. healthcare system annually disposes of twelve billion pounds of unused, usable medical supplies and equipment valued on the order of billions of dollars. In fact, the medical sector is the second-largest contributor to landfills, accounting for 8% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The current paradigm propagates economic inefficiency, environmental burden, and avoidable human suffering. With this in mind, Blueprints For Pangaea is an international, student-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to addressing global health care inequalities. In order to bridge the gap between surplus and need, we use our national network of university chapters to redirect life-saving medical supplies away from landfills and into the hands of medical professionals that make a difference where it is most needed: on a global scale.

Blueprints For Pangaea is a medical surplus recovery organization (MSRO) that provides sustainable solutions to inefficient health care resource distribution. As a social enterprise, Blueprints For Pangaea is a network of university chapters united in addressing global health care inequalities by reallocating excess, unused medical supplies—that would otherwise be discarded—from U.S. hospitals and suppliers to oversea countries who are in need. With fewer medical resources to process, our partner hospitals are able to cut expenses and reduce their environmental footprints while gaining community goodwill. Since we obtain medical resources via donation, we can in turn offer them to foreign hospitals at massively subsidized prices, thereby enabling affordable, higher-quality patient care in areas of need. If provided, this grant will support Blueprints For Pangaea’s newly founded University of Southern California chapter, whose primary beneficiary in all of the aforementioned is the greater Los Angeles community and its salient urban health needs.

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

The Blueprints for Pangaea University of Southern California chapter is a newly registered student organization with 15 general members that spread through different branches including development, finance, and operations. As of now, our team is working to establish the Blueprints for Pangaea initiative in Los Angeles. We are in communication with local partners to assess medical resource needs and potential partnerships. Some of the organizations that we are in contact with include: USC Family Caregiver Support Center, Keck Street Medicine, USC Homelessness Initiative, and CureCervicalCancer. These local organizations work closely with Los Angeles County in providing healthcare services. Our project, will enable up to 10,000 people living in Los Angeles County to have access to vital medical supplies that would otherwise end up in landfills; hence, the organization is effectively making LA a greener, more economically sustainable and, ultimately, healthier place to live in.

The Blueprints for Pangaea, University of Southern California chapter will measure success through a few methods. Primarily, we will measure pounds of medical supplies shipped and calculate the worth of the medical supplies by maintaining a comprehensive inventory of our supplies and shipments. We continually seek to amplify our impact by partnering with socially-conscious hospitals and clinics that do not have systems in place to address surplus medical supplies. We will measure the number of nonprofits and hospitals that we partner with. In doing so, we will be able to utilize data on the demographics and number of people within the communities that these partners impact. This will allow us to calculate the number of people and types of people who are gaining access to our donated medical supplies in L.A. county.

Healthcare access