Unused orthopedic devices, collected for public hospitals

Sprains treated with casts, because a cast was the cheaper option. That is what the director of a public hospital for children told Alexandra Cabalin, she says, when explaining how important the donations were: low funds did not allow good quality equipment to treat the children.

Alexandra, a student at International School Nido de Aguilas in Santiago, collects donations of medical supplies, such as orthopedic devices, from people in the community who are not using them anymore. She then donates them to public health institutions such as children's homes and public hospitals, which, she says, do not have enough funding in Chile to afford medical supplies. She works through semesters. Last semester she gathered over 1,000 dollars' worth of medical supplies and donated them to these institutions.

“work hard in silence and let your success be your noise”

Alexandra Cabalin

The project began as a CAS initiative for the IB, with three other peers, and finished last December with donations to two public health institutions, a children's home and a public hospital for children. After that, she says, her peers did not want to keep working on it because of the IB workload. She did. "I took this CAS project and made it my personal project so I could keep helping these institutions and to improve the treatment people get," she says.

She cares, she says, because there is a big health inequality between social classes in Chile, "making it harder for those who are underprivileged to get quality access to healthcare". She mainly sees the effect through her dad's side of the family, who cannot get quality and urgent healthcare attention, "as there are waitlists to be attended with an average wait of one year."

"Those donations allowed for the children to have a better quality treatment."