Picture this: It is a normal Tuesday evening. You are coming home from a late dinner with friends after work when, on a lonely road near your house, you run over a nail in the road, blow out a tire and end up with your truck upside down in a ditch.
By the time the paramedics get to you, you have been unconscious for several minutes, with blood pouring from a nasty-looking head wound. A Life Flight helicopter lands in a nearby field and carries you nearly 100 miles in the dark of night to the trauma surgeons at UAB.
You only find this out the next morning, when you wake up in a hospital gown in a strange city. You have not been to Birmingham in years. Your cellphone was shattered in the crash. The good news is everything seems OK and you will be discharged in a day or two. The bad news is no one you know can take time out to come pick you up — or bring you some real clothes to put on when you leave.
Donation locations
- Volunteer Services: Spain Wallace, Floor 1
- UAB Hospital information desk: North Pavilion, Floor 2, across from the Starbucks
- Medical Student Services: Volker Hall, Floor 1, Suite 102
See the current list of clothing needs on the Compassion Closet site.
Patients in this predicament at most hospitals — including UAB, until two years ago — are discharged in paper scrubs. And the numbers are surprisingly high. “We see 6,900 trauma patients a year here at UAB,” said Daniel Cox, M.D., professor and trauma medical director in the Division of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. “That is 19 acute trauma patients every single day. We have a very standardized, rapid intervention we do with each patient — and the goal is from the time you hit the door to leaving the trauma bay, we want to do all of that initial evaluation and assessment in eight minutes. You have five people — physicians, nurses and respiratory therapists — descending on the patient, and I would say 90-plus percent of the time, because of the severity of their injuries and the urgency of the situation, we need to cut off their clothes to evaluate them.”
Even when clothes do not need to be cut away, they may be covered in blood or otherwise soiled from the traumatic events that brought them to the hospital.
In 2023, first-year UAB Heersink School of Medicine student Nick Hakes saw this need while shadowing in UAB’s Emergency Department. He recalled his own hospital stay years before when, as he explained, he was discharged in paper scrubs, walking out to the street cold and “nearly naked.”
The current group of Compassion Closet volunteers from the Heersink School of Medicine.
Hakes launched the Compassion Closet in 2023 to address the issue. Using funding from the Division of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, Hakes and six other medical student volunteers bought donation bins and closet shelving to store clothing, and put the bins around the hospital to collect clothes. Today, the Compassion Closet’s student volunteers restock a series of organizers in the always-busy UAB Emergency Department each week. The success of the Compassion Closet led to another partnership, in which the students distribute clothes to individuals facing housing insecurity and barriers to access to other social and medical resources twice a month through the Street Medicine Clinics led by Equal Access Birmingham, a medical student-run free clinic. They will soon open a mobile closet for patients and families in UAB’s Heart and Lung Transplant ICU.
Give online
The community “has been incredibly wonderful about donations,” Rawlins said. Nevertheless, “we do find ourselves occasionally running low on specific items throughout the year, especially men’s pants.” Financial donations can be made online. These funds are “used directly to help with the closet’s functioning, including supplementing needed items,” Rawlins said. “As we look toward the future goals for the Compassion Closet, we also consider monetary donations, grants and awards when contemplating the viability of adding another mobile closet.”
“With the colder months approaching, warm and sturdy sweaters, pants, gloves, socks and shoes are our strongest needs,” said Kaylee Rawlins, a second-year student at the Heersink School of Medicine and current president of the Compassion Closet. “We are also happy to take blankets, handwarmers, etc. We do request that any undergarments and socks be new, but other items can be gently used as long as they are clean and in good condition.” (See a full list of needed items on the Compassion Closet website.)
What happens to items that are not in good condition? “During our intake and quality-control process, we contemplate every item as if it were going to one of our own family members,” Rawlins said. “Any item that does not pass our quality control is donated to Lovelady Thrift Store.”
The most common misconception Rawlins experiences “is who is benefiting from this,” she said. “We have people traveling through the area who end up getting in a car crash and brought to the hospital. We have patients brought in from all parts of the state in ambulances and by helicopter. We have people from all walks of life who have benefited — moms, dads, grandmas — people just like you and me.”
“It is an uncomfortable position to be in,” Cox said. “This is a very simple act to make being in the hospital less of a traumatic experience.”
“I immediately knew I had to get involved”
Kaylee Rawlins first heard about the Compassion Closet at an organization fair just after she started at the Heersink School of Medicine. “Prior to medical school, I spent three years volunteering at a health clinic for underinsured and underserved populations, followed by a year working in UAB’s Emergency Department as a Patient Care Technician,” Rawlins said. Those exposures gave her a “good idea of the extreme need for patients to have access to clean, weather-appropriate clothing,” she said. “I had also witnessed how dehumanizing it could feel for patients to be discharged in paper scrubs. When I saw the mission the Compassion Closet was working toward, I immediately knew I had to get involved. It’s been a tangible way to improve the patient experience at UAB, and I am incredibly excited to see how the Compassion Closet grows over time.”
Daniel Cox, M.D., professor and trauma medical director in the Division of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, notes that the Compassion Closet has been overseen consistently by medical students since its inception. “Our staff runs it out of the ED in terms of day-to-day management, but it is the medical students who saw this gap and proposed a way to address it,” Cox said. “They brought it to us and we said, ‘That is a fabulous idea.’ All the credit goes to them.”