Helping Hands: Collaborative Effort to Donate PPE to Our UMMC Colleagues

Written By: Emily Heil, PharmD, BCPS-AQ ID, Associate Professor of Pharmacy Practice and Science

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of Helping Hands stories authored by School of Pharmacy faculty, staff, students, trainees, and alumni who stepped up to assist their family and friends, colleagues, and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I am the coordinator of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC). When telework and distancing learning began in mid-March, Mandy Oglesby, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences (PSC), reached out to me with the great idea to have faculty members with labs in PSC gather personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies to donate to UMMC. Ashlee Mattingly, PharmD, assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice and Science (PPS), also donated essential PPE items from the School of Pharmacy’s Abilities Lab. Her donation included 500 surgical masks, hundreds of contact precaution gowns, and hand sanitizer. She and Jim Polli, PhD, the Shangraw/Noxell Endowed Chair in Industrial Pharmacy and Pharmaceutics, partnered to donate thousands of gloves from their compounding project, which Pam Crowe, the School’s facilities manager, helped gather.

Dr. Oglesby and Angela Wilkes, PhD, the Isaac E. Emerson Endowed Professor in PSC, also helped gather multiple RNA extraction kits from their labs, which went to immediate use to assist with testing efforts in the UMMC microbiology lab.

These collaborative and thoughtful donations were able to be put to immediate use at UMMC.