Many hospitals in the Pacific do not have one pair of scissors for every nurse. Our Australian hospitals use single-use disposable scissors, often packed in twin-packs with other tools. Unused scissors are recycled daily. Nurses harvest the unused items for Uplift, and now we ship them to the Solomon Islands. They will rust eventually, but do serve well.

In addition we buy and supply items that are usually in short supply. When Uplift started working with the National Referral Hospital in Honiara, outpatient clinic staff had to go into a ward to borrow a thermometer. A simple thermometer costs $1.40. We sent in 30, a small revolution for under $45.00 AUD.

Solomon Islands nurses had not seen the kit bags Australian nurses use to carry the tools they constantly use: scissors, forceps, thermometer, torch, watch and ballpoint pen.

The Australian Quilters Association are making gorgeous kit bags for Uplift to fill and supply. Uplift needs donations to buy items to fill the bags.

Download the Uplift Nurses - Kit Bag Pattern.

www.nursesonly.com.au have been hugely generous in their support of this project. We have also sent stethoscopes, sphygmomanometers, pulse oximeters, an ECG machine, and the hospital's first foetal Doppler ultrasound. They would like a defibrillator. They don't have one.

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Uplift Victoria is working with librarians to harvest books from school and public libraries for schools in the Solomon Islands that often have NO books, or very few. 1,000 boxes of books were shipped in 2013, our first year, including 4 complete sets of the 2010 Encyclopædia Brittanica. Many schools received only 4 boxes of books, but 80 books in a school is better than none.

Visit the Schools without Books Facebook page

The Primary school library pictured here had fewer than 20 books, and had received no new books for more than a decade.