WHEN the old Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) was decommissioned about five years ago, Dave Cockshell of Gawler East and his team leapt into action.

The Rotary Club of Gawler Light member oversees a region of a Rotary program, Donations in Kind (DIK), that in 2016-17 involved about 600 RAH surplus items such as hospital beds, barouches, chairs, tables and medical machines being packed into 27 shipping containers.

The precious cargo – with a purchase price of $12-13 million, according to Mr Cockshell – was then shipped to health sites in developing nations including Congo, Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Mongolia, Nigeria, Nepal, Zambia and Sierra Leone.

Mr Cockshell, 68, a retired geophysicist, is still very much involved as DIK’s manager central region for the program, which was begun about 30 years ago by Gawler Light Rotarian Joan and her husband Cliff, now deceased.

The region’s latest project is packing up about 70 surplus beds from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital after its redevelopment began, and shipping them to Svua, Fiji, next month. Mr Cockshell’s RAH efforts were recognised in July 2020 with the US-based board of Rotary International’s Service Above Self Award, the highest honour the service organisation bestows on members who demonstrate their commitment to helping others by volunteering their time and talents.

Mr Cockshell said the award was presented “in the middle of Covid and I didn’t have any clue about it”.

“I was at home on a virtual conference call and my wife (Michelle) presented it to me,” he said.

“It was all very much a surprise. “I was very surprised but I feel it is more of a team appreciation of what DIK does.”

Only 150 Service Above Self Awards are given out each the year around the world.

“I worked out that’s 17 for Australia – ever,” Mr Cockshell said.

“That’s over 100-odd years.

“There are only five of these in SA. We have another of our members in Gawler Light who has one, Dick Milner (OAM); there are two in the Barossa Valley club and one at Regency Park. “It’s really in recognition of a big team effort that we had pretty much on the Royal Adelaide Hospital.”

Mr Cockshell said DIK was part of a national body called Rotary Australia World Community Service.

“I’ve been looking after this for 12 years now but (DIK) has been going for nearly 30 years,” he said.

Mr and Mrs Tingey’s first overseas donation was “a pallet of baked beans going to PNG”, he said.

“They started it off in their bus shed – that’s where they kept stuff – and it just grew and grew,” he said.

“We now lease a warehouse facility from the State Government at Edinburgh Park – we’ve had that lease for 22 years.

“We’ve got to find in the order of about $14,000 a year to operate it… the focus is on medical and schooling equipment. That fits in with Rotary’s health and literacy pillars.

“We’ve got linkages through a lot of places, most of the hospitals, a lot of the aged-care facilities, a lot of doctors and dental practices.

“It’s largely word of mouth – we don’t go advertising anything. Just through the Rotary community, we get more than enough.

“About every second day, there’s something new. It could be the size of a shoebox, it could be the size of a hospital – and it’s been everything in between.

“The old RAH, they were moving it to the new site (on North Terrace); they weren’t taking all their stuff. They went through a process of working out what was going to be surplus. They were starting to get lots of requests for lots of folk, locally and overseas.

“They didn’t really have the skillset or experience to handle the overseas stuff.

“We would get out a (shipping) container every five to six weeks. The last couple of years have been horrid, obviously. Shipping at the moment is just awful – you can’t get a boat, you can’t get a container – there’s no service. And if you can get one, it’s at least twice the price.”

Mr Cockshell said at one point, he was dealing with 65 expressions of interest for surplus RAH equipment, “but that whee- dled down to about 45”.

“We ended up sending 27 shipping containers from the RAH overseas,” he said.

“We split it into two parts – biomedical, which is the machines, and the non-bio- medical, which is the hospital beds, barouches, chairs, tables, the ward-type stuff.

“It ended up with nearly 600 individual items – and our request list was something like 20,000. So it was a very interesting Christmas I had in 2017 trying to work out how to ‘divvy out’ 600 items.

“It’s still the largest single Rotary project in SA – the nominal value of the goods was about $3.5 million; a purchase price would be $12-13 million.”

Mr cockshell said the next largest project involved the Calvary Wakefield Hospital in the CBD.

“When they moved out to a new hospital in Calvary Adelaide, all their surplus came to us – that’s 38 truck- loads,” he said.

“Covid came in March and they (the State Government) wanted to set up some hospitals just in case. There were vacant rooms (at Calvary Wakefield) so in March and April, a whole wagonload of trucks went and took the beds and other stuff back.

“It was a very interesting four months, I can assure you, but it was really nice to be able to help a needy community, in this case our own.”

Mr Cockshell said if anyone had surplus domiciliary walkers, frames or walking sticks that were no longer needed, they could contact him or their local Rotary club. Those wanting to donate goods to Donations in Kind or needing more information can email dik.central@rawcs.org.au