SPOKANE, Wash – Gregory Repetti, the President of MultiCare Deaconess and Valley Hospitals, said their Materials Management Team has created a streamlined operation to ensure they are not wasting materials.
“We now have a process where we want to have a stockpile for emergencies, but we also make sure that that stockpile is rotated into the front lines as well,” said Repetti.
However, the Washington State Department of Health’s approach was different. They disposed of a significant amount of PPE, including nearly 14 million gowns, 5 million masks, and over 140 thousand face shields, amounting to a total cost of $1.5 million.
A DOH official said this is a small portion of their budget. For context, they told NonStop Local that over the course of the pandemic, they spent $475 million on PPE. They added that the items that were disposed of were not only expired but had a monetary value of zero.
They say they did their best to salvage the PPE they could by donating it to the Marshall Islands when a typhoon hit the territory in 2022, which was around a million individual PPE pieces.
Repetti emphasizes the critical role of PPE in their hospitals, which are smaller than the state Department of Health. He states, “These masks can be the deciding factor between someone falling ill and someone staying healthy. They can be the difference between allowing someone to visit a loved one and not being able to enter the hospital. This underscores the importance of proper PPE management in our healthcare system.”
