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How to Run a Donation Drive for Healthcare Workers

Updated: Apr 2, 2020

Donation drives are a great way to collect much-needed masks, gloves, gowns, disinfectant, and other crucial supplies from communities that might not know where to donate them, or fear exposing themselves to hospital environments. For example, Stanford Medical Students were recently able to collect over 14,000 masks for hospitals through a (socially-distanced) donation drive! By collecting supplies in one place, crucial PPE can be efficiently distributed to healthcare workers on the frontline, quickly.


Want to organize your own PPE Drive in your city or town? Here are some tried-and-true tips answering your most frequently asked questions about organizing your own, from UCSF's Hunter Jackson, India Perez-Urbano, and Brian McSteen.



*POST-DRIVE QUESTIONNAIRE In an effort to show the power of med students’ capacity to organize in crisis, we are collecting data on the success of student-run PPE drives across the country. If you organized a PPE drive in your city, please complete this short questionnaire. Thanks!


COLLECTING DONATIONS

Note: Our street-based drives mostly collected masks from individuals in the community (which was feasible in CA because many people had masks from the wildfires).


What items did you collect?

  • Unused N95 respirators and surgical masks. They can be opened, as long as they have not been used.

  • Unopened packages of disposable gloves

  • Unopened containers of hand sanitizer

  • Unopened containers of disinfectants and disinfecting wipes

  • Packaged, unused protective goggles.

  • Here's a useful graphic of the equipment most needed right now. Please share!

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Tip: If you're aiming to raise supplies for a certain location, ask your institution/hospital what donations they will accept/use.


What was your set up?

  • Signage: affiliation, ask, hours, and accepted items

  • White coats and IDs

  • Bins for people to drop off donations in

  • Hand sanitizer

  • Chalk to demarcate 6 feet radius

  • Stayed at the same location with the same hours each day


How did you stay safe and minimize exposure?

  • We used chalk to demarcate a 6ft barrier between volunteers and between the public.

  • We handled all PPE with gloves.

  • We tried to limit the number of volunteers at each site.

  • Bins were placed at the 6ft line, and we instructed the public to drop donations into the bins.


How did you pick a location?

  • Non-clinical site to minimize the public’s exposure to patients/physicians.

  • Heavy foot traffic (near a public park).

  • A place that is easily accessible by car and would allow people to quickly park and drop off their donation.


How long were you collecting donations for?

  • We collected masks from 10am-3pm, for 3-7 days in a row.

  • We found that weekend days (Friday-Sunday) work better than weekdays.


Did you have a system for organizing the donations?

  • We used cardboard boxes/garbage bags to pack the donations by type (i.e., masks vs. gloves vs. goggles/face shields, etc.) and labeled them with the number of donations inside.


PROMOTING DRIVES


DISTRIBUTING DONATIONS TO HOSPITALS


Who did you contact?

  • We reached out to the Head of Infection Control of the hospitals that we wanted to donate to, they gave us instructions on how to drop off the donations (address and point of contact).

  • DonatePPE.org had great information on drop-off locations and contacts.


How did you decide what health systems to send your donations to?

  • Three days after we started our first drive, UCSF began its own official PPE drive at 3 locations across the city. So we decided to prioritize sending our donations to under-resourced health systems that didn’t have the capacity to organize an official drive.

  • To assess which health systems are in need, we called/emailed all the major health systems who had listed contact info on DonatePPE.org, letting them know that we were med students trying to triage donations. Sometimes the contacts listed are volunteer coordinators, etc. but they are almost always able to direct you to the materials managers who have the most up to date info on needs.

  • We asked contacts 1) when they anticipated running out of the materials we had available (i.e. N-95s, isolation gowns, whatever it is you have a supply of) and then 2) whether they had more urgent needs not within our current supply.

  • Most systems are very forthcoming with med students, especially once you share that donations are incoming; however, be careful with the information as some systems do not want it shared with media/the public.


How did you allocate the donations for each receiving hospital?

  • We filled cars up to the brim and counted the number of cars that went to each hospital.


MEDIA & PRESS

  • Take lots and lots and lots of photos (of the collections and drop-offs). We made a Box folder of “photos for press”, so that we can easily send the link to any media contacts.

  • Make sure your institution’s Public Relations office is notified of your efforts if you are planning on speaking to media/reporters. Our institution asked us to sign a media relief form.

  • Do not answer any questions you are not qualified to answer.

  • Remember that you are representing your institution.


WHAT WE DID NOT DO

  • We did not go to individuals’ homes to pick up donations.

  • We did not give out any medical advice or COVID advice (if people asked about symptoms we told them to contact their PCP).

  • Many people asked us “I have an X connection with manufacturers in X country, who at UCSF can I speak to about this?” We told people that we are only medical students and we cannot speak to the procurement side of this (and we don't have any contacts).

  • We did not ship donations across state lines.

  • We did not take monetary donations (we directed individuals to UCSF’s COVID Response Fund, which accepts financial donations).


Any more questions?

India Perez-Urbano at iperezu@ucsf.edu


 
 
 

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