Organizing the Monte Plata Almacén or Storage room - Week of 7/8

The big project that has taken the majority of our time in the Monte Plata clinic has been the almacén or storage room. Each of the Project Hope clinics in the Dominican has a storage room.  The new clinic in Haina that is set for groundbreaking in mid-september will also be equipped with one.  They are utilized for storing: donated medications, ordered medications, supplies, documents and equipment. 

When we were first introduced into the storage room, there were lots of boxes of dispersed throughout the room.  The center of the room had numerous boxes on the floor that made it difficult to move through the room and identify what items were inside the boxes. Jillian, Liz, Abdias and I have been working tirelessly in the storage room to create a sustainable organizational structure that can be maintained for the foreseeable future. The Monte Plata almacén is divided into two by the medication shelf that runs through most of the middle of the storage room. We cleared the many piles of boxes in the back area. Thanks to Liz, new labels have been made for donated medications as well as medications that are ordered by the clinic via Project Hope. There are now also signs for gynecology, dentistry, cleaning supplies, medical supplies, medications, and eventually nursing as well. There is a new shelf that will soon be built and then utilized specifically for nursing. Our goal was to remove everything from the boxes so the staff can recognize what is at their disposal. The majority of the boxes have been emptied and whose contents have been placed on shelves or placed in a mini-bag with other items to be sold at the pharmacy. We called the mini-bags or special offers, “ofertas”. Examples include: body wash, sunblock, toothbrushes, acne wash and an insane amount of bandages! One example of a type of ofertas we made included: two toothbrushes, listerine mouth wash and bandages of course! 

The top two pictures show the boxes in the middle of the room that we eventually cleared and assigned its items to a particular area. The picture on the top left also shows how some medication shelves were cleared for re-organization.The next two show Jillian, Liz and I making 'ofertas' for patients to be sold at the pharmacy. The last two are of me taping up a new sign for the gloves section and Jillian helping to clean the door into the almacén

Having an assortment of items sold at pharmacy at a inexpensive price allows customers to recognize the care the clinic shows and gives them an incentive to return to the clinic for health related checkups or follow-ups.  Many of the boxes of toothbrushes, bandages, and skin care products were underutilized or unrecognized. Now the storage is less cluttered and more efficient in terms of how items flow in and out of the almacén. The future goal is to always have the storage room organized and to make sure new items have a set location.