Belizeans in Los Angeles Organize Fundraiser for Vital Medical Equipment Donation to Belize

A group of Belizeans in Los Angeles are holding a fundraiser to support a donation of medical equipment being shipped to Belize. The initiative is being led by Edward and Patricia Lord. The group received the equipment from Providence Cedar Sinai Tarzana Hospital and is holding a fundraiser to purchase parts and accessories needed for them to fully function. Patricia Lord explained that she and her husband have been working on making such a donation for years and are finally receiving the support they need to make it happen.

Patricia Lord, Donor: “Over the last ten years my husband had had multiple opportunities to secure rather large donations of equipment for Belize and I have over the past ten years reaching out to people to try and help me with the logistics of getting it to Belize and it hasn’t been successful up until this point. It was going to be my last time attempting to reach out to people to see who can help me and I don’t quite remember how I got in touch with the ambassador affiliated with Belize and she assured me that she was gonna do the groundwork with the Ministry of Health to secure funding for the shipping of the equipment. We are currently running a fundraiser to procure every little widget that will complete equipment that we feel is vital and will make a difference and we have done our due diligence in making sure that we have gone through, looked at those carefully. My husband and I last year twice visited and toured the hospital in Belize City and a couple of the hospitals outside Belize City to ensure that we had an understanding of what would make the biggest impact for the Belizean population.”

Patricia Lord, Donor: “We have gotten Stryker Med Surg beds, we’ve gotten fifty of those. We’ve gotten seven Hillrom Labour and Delivery beds. We have I believe four gurneys, we’re in the process of trying to secure additional gurneys. We’ve gotten twenty six defibrillators. We’ve gotten patient monitors, we’ve gotten suction pumps, pulse oximetry, crib, baby bassinets. We’ve gotten a lot so we’ve gotten surgical steel instruments, we’ve gotten patient gowns, we’ve gotten pediatric scales, we’ve gotten Welch Allen monitors and a lot of what we’ve gotten- some of what we’ve gotten is pretty new. What we’ve done is we’ve taken the time to make sure that anything that is a biomedical piece of equipment that we had volunteers that are Belizean that are biomedical engineers within the Providence system one of them outside the Providence system that came in and made sure that everything that we are sending in terms of equipment is plug and play.”

Those wishing to support the initiative can find the link to the GoFundMe page via the Facebook pages of Edward Lord Patricia Lord or Leesha Castanedez.