McLellan once worked as a nurse in Saudi Arabia and her wardrobe reflects her extensive travels in the developing world: velveteen pants from China, a chunky sea rock necklace from Senegal and bangles from Ethiopia. Places that welcome our medical largesse.

At the back of her office, she pushed through a set of swinging double doors that led to her disposable medical supplies warehouse, a room the size of a gymnasium, with 20-foot ceilings and glassy concrete floors.


Donations from throughout Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts come in through a loading dock at the back. McLellan calls it “golden trash” and it generally falls into a handful of categories: equipment discarded for upgraded models, supplies tossed after a hospital changed vendors, or materials donated by the families of patients who have died. Other items are past their expiration dates or were swept out by strict infection control procedures, but remain safely usable.

McLellan grabs a bag from a haphazard, 10-foot mound of boxes and bulging sacks waiting to be sorted. Its contents, she says, came from a single room in a hospital’s intensive care unit. She dumps the bag out onto a table like a kid pouring out a pillowcase full of Halloween candy. The stuff rains down into a pile that’s three square feet: Handfuls of unopened and unexpired sterile needles, two dozen sterile syringes, packets of alcohol and antiseptic pads, IV tubing; a roll of tape that’s never been used, a bag of IV solution that expires in September 2018, 14 saline flushes that expire in 2019, an unopened package of suction catheters and a pulse oximeter adapter.

“This is normal,” she said. “This is every hospital.”

McLellan started her nonprofit after watching patient rooms being cleaned out at Maine Medical Center, where she was a nurse administrator. When patients were discharged, hospital staff threw out everything, including unopened supplies. McLellan got permission from the hospital’s CEO to put out bins to save the discarded items.

A year and a half later, she’d gathered more than 11,000 pounds of supplies and equipment in her house. Today, Partners has three paid employees — McLellan is a volunteer — and an annual budget of $357,000, most of it from individual donations. Hundreds of volunteers pitch in. Similar nonprofits have sprung up around the country.

On a recent afternoon, Donald Madison, 47, Paul Farren, 69, and William Silveira, 85, picked up a used anesthesia machine, an exam table and other items at a Maine Medical Center storage facility and brought them to a different Partners’ warehouse stuffed with medical hardware: a sea of new-looking wheelchairs, a shiny mountain of walkers and canes and neat rows of IV pumps. The biomedical equipment room has ultrasound machines, anesthesia machines, laparoscopic surgery towers and more. Biomedical engineers check out each piece before it is sent on to a country in need.

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