SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Wheelchairs, hospital beds and walkers can be expensive pieces of medical equipment, especially for people without health insurance. So a nonprofit in rural Ohio is helping people in need by collecting used items and donating them. Kendall Crawford of the Ohio Newsroom Reports.
KENDALL CRAWFORD, BYLINE: Ed Newman enjoys his weekly drives, darting from nursing homes in eastern Washington County to hospitals on Ohio's southern border. He sees it as a scavenger hunt. Each stop is a chance to find a discarded piece of medical equipment.
ED NEWMAN: It's important to salvage that, you know?
CRAWFORD: Newman is the director of Rural Action's medical donation program. Today, he's picking up items from one of the program's collection sites at Meigs County Public Library.
NEWMAN: Oh, OK.
UNIDENTIFIED LIBRARIAN: There's those.
NEWMAN: Oh, OK.
UNIDENTIFIED LIBRARIAN: And then I do have something in here.
CRAWFORD: The librarian there pulls out a walker that looks almost brand-new.
UNIDENTIFIED LIBRARIAN: This looks like a good one.
NEWMAN: Yeah.
CRAWFORD: Newman loads the valuable find into the back of his truck already packed with an assortment of supplies. Instead of going to landfills or sitting in storage, this costly medical equipment will go directly to community members.
NEWMAN: So we get all this really nice equipment from people who were well off. And then we get that really nice stuff to people who don't have anything. And we do it - like, instead of Robin Hood, you know, they just give it to us.
CRAWFORD: The collection program began in 2021, modeled after Cleveland's MedWish International, an organization that donates usable medical equipment overseas and locally in northeast Ohio. Newman recognized that such a program could be a lifeline for rural Appalachian Ohio, an area where there are few health care professionals. Plus, a lack of transportation options and limited broadband make it even more difficult to get care. So far, the program has helped around 2,300 people.
NEWMAN: There's a lot of people that don't have ready access to health care. Some of the people we give stuff to are, like, in a desperate situation. And this changes that.
CRAWFORD: These gaps in health care access mean demand is high for items as small and inexpensive as bandages to large pricier items, like motorized wheelchairs, which can cost anywhere between $2,000 and $20,000. Newman has around eight of these chairs in his truck today, which he drops off at the Lil Repair Shop in Athens County.
DENNIS JONES: How can I help you?
NEWMAN: Hi. I got some mechanical chairs.
JONES: Got you.
CRAWFORD: The repair shop's owner, Dennis Jones, takes this highly specialized equipment and fixes it at little or no cost for those in need.
JONES: We had a gentleman who - hospice had come to us, and he only had about six months to live. And his insurance declined him on the chair. They didn't want to spend the money on it because, you know, that it wouldn't be used long. And we were able to give him a chair. And that gave him the ability to get around the nursing home and to be able to still play cards with everybody, go get his meals, make him more independent.
CRAWFORD: That's the strength of the program. It can't foot the bill for a surgery, provide lifesaving medication or decrease the region's high rates of chronic health conditions. But for people like Rachel Everett (ph), it can provide comfort. When she was recovering from knee surgery last year, she borrowed a hospital bed, a bedside commode and a walker from the program.
RACHEL EVERETT: It was a huge relief to have all of the equipment that I needed to heal and get well at home without worrying about the financial hardship or logistics of getting what I needed.
CRAWFORD: Once she healed, Everett gave her equipment back to the program to help the next person. For NPR News, I'm Kendall Crawford in southeast Ohio.
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PFEIFFER: This afternoon on All Things Considered, neurotic robots are a staple of science fiction. C-3PO of "Star Wars" is high-strung. Marvin the Paranoid Android from "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" is, like his name says, paranoid and depressed. Marvel's Ultron is obsessive and a megalomaniac. Yet most real-life robots are designed to be extroverted and cheerful. Turns out a recent study shows that robots with neuroses are considered more human and relatable. Listen later today in the NPR app, on a smart speaker or on this public radio station.
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