Healthcare hoarding

Yesterday, we had to clean-out a storage room in the clinic I manage. I had no idea what was in this storage room. In the grand scale of things that I worry about, what is hidden in the back of the storage room is way, way down on the list.

So, one of the medical assistants and I decided to dig in. The storage room is small. How bad could it be? We asked the janitor for a garbage bag. Clearly this man has seen this sort of thing before. He gave us about a dozen big garbage bags. We ran out.

This storage room had the most terrifying collection of random things. There was stock from the 60's and 70's in there. There were parts of electronic equipment that didn't even make sense. There were things we had looked for and given up on a long time ago. But, the amount of paper was astounding. I am now convinced that no one has thrown a piece of paper away in that clinic in 10 years. On top of that, there was a lot of stock. A LOT of stock. For example, we occasionally use red rubber catheters. Maybe once or twice a month, we use one. The level we keep in our machine is 5, I think. We currently have it stocked with 10, but we don't really need that many. In the storage room, we found 400!!!!

We found stock that was expired and stock that was so old it didn't have an expiration date. We found plastic things that were so old, they had browned and cracked. We found an ugly old chair. We found a lot.

Well, after the stock room, we were on a roll, so we kept going through some of the other things. We have a cart with dressings. We have a room with overstock. We have a medication room. We went through those. I can't believe how much stuff we have. There are needles that we needed a dozen or so, but could only order them by the case. We have syringes that I have no idea what we would possibly use them for. We have catheter bags. Enough catheter bags we could build an office building out of them.

We threw a ton away. We filled the hallway with garbage and we had to have the dumpster come multiple times. Then, we put things in my office that we needed to figure out what to do with. These are the things we will never use. We have way too many. We can't figure out why we have them in the first place, etc.

Gotta love it.