By Nick Ravins
Nurses at Tampa General Hospital have been working on an initiative to help the homeless for the past month and are taking an innovative approach.
The nurses are taking sterile surgical wraps that would normally be discarded and sewing them together to make sleeping bags for the homeless. These wraps are extremely thin and have a consistency comparable to cardboard.
The surgical wraps are used to protect operating room instruments from contamination and are disposed of after only one use. After recognizing the wastefulness of these surgical wraps, RN Karley Wright and Nicole Hubbard, Chief Nurse Anesthetist at Tampa General Hospital, began to think of different ideas to repurpose the wraps.
“These are the wraps that come on the outside of the surgical trays after they’re sterilized and then removed before surgery, so they’re completely clean, and they’re really nice,” said Angelique McCormick, Director of Volunteer Services at Tampa General Hospital, “They’re very warm and waterproof.”
The surgical wraps are made of a material that is very insulating and also water repellent, making them ideal for people who do not have shelter. The wraps can also be used to protect an individual’s personal belongings.
After Wright came up with the concept of the sleeping bags, she emailed many of her colleagues and recruited volunteers to help design the sleeping bags and sew them together themselves.
“We’re hoping to keep doing it, we’ve been really fortunate to have such a strong community outreach,” said McCormick, “So many people have been willing to reach out and sew the bags together.”
As word spread around Tampa General Hospital and circulated on local news sites, a strong network of volunteers was quickly established. Within one month, Tampa General Hospital had created over 100 sleeping bags.
“The team at Tampa General Hospital goes the extra mile,” said state Representative Jamie Grant, a Tampa Republican, “They’re constantly finding innovative ways to serve our community, whether it’s as complex as adopting new technologies to increase efficiency in hospital care or as simple as recycling materials to keep the homeless warm, Tampa General truly does put the people they serve above all else.”
Tampa General Hospital performs over 35,000 surgeries every year, which would generate a large amount of paper waste if not for the resourceful idea that the nurses adopted.
“It’s not really like a sleeping bag you would think of, but they’re awesome,” said Beth Ross, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Blanket Tampa Bay, which serves the region’s homeless population, “It’s more like an envelope that you can slide into and it offers protection.”
Blanket Tampa Bay now hands out the sleeping bags to the homeless every Monday night at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in Tampa, where they also provide free hot meals and other supplies.
“Karley Wright is one of the educators in surgical services and she took this idea and helped the project come to life at the hospital,” said McCormick.
