My first impression of Claude Rigney was of a quietly
spoken man with a calm and gentle manner. When we sat down to talk recently, what
he said revealed that he is also a man committed to making a difference in
life.
At the time, Claude had just completed arrangements
to send 10 palettes of medications donated by pharmaceutical company Aspen
Australia to recipients in neighbouring Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor). This
was medicine freely provided where it was needed. Claude dealt with the
auditing, regulatory and logistical requirements and the supply went ahead,
transported by Toll Global Logistics to Darwin and shipped from there to
Timor-Leste by shipping line ANL.
He puts the matter from Aspen Australia’s point of
view. ‘Peter Penn of Aspen Australia
responded generously to my very first request for donations of suitable
medicines. Peter is passionate about this work of charity and wishes it to
continue and expand. While his company has the satisfaction
of knowing that it is aiding the sick and poor of developing
countries with its medicine donations, it also understands that it
avoids the waste and expense of having to destroy its 'decommissioned' (but not
out-of-date) products. Alpha-Pharm was the first drug company to support
this work, and most recently John Timmins and his Nova Pharmaceuticals company
have come on board.’
Claude has been helping supply medication to needy neighbouring
people for around 50 years. Working as an employed pharmacist (he later ran his
own pharmacy in the Sydney suburb of Balmain) he saw the matter clearly.
On
the one hand, people in developing nations, and in
situations of poverty overseas, were in great need of pharmaceutical products.
On
the other hand, he saw the large drug companies and
suppliers of pharmaceuticals in Australia able to supply products in abundance
to meet our health needs here. These pharmaceutical products were all required
by law to carry an expiry date and those approaching this date could not legally
be supplied to Australian outlets. They were labelled as ‘decommissioned stock’
and, in Australia, were required to be destroyed – at considerable cost to the
companies concerned.
Claude knew, however, that such stock was still
effective and useful. That is why in the 1960s and ’70s, he began working with
the Red Cross to send medications, donated by pharmaceutical companies, to
people overseas who needed them. ‘If you could nominate a clinic in the Third
World, they would donate the pharmaceuticals and the donor would pay the
shipping cost,’ he says. ‘I also worked with St Vincent de Paul.’
Since then, new regulations have changed this
pattern. But Claude has continued his work, organising and co-ordinating
supplies of ‘decommissioned stock’ to places where it is gladly received and
much needed. He continues to use personal contact with well-established pharmaceutical
suppliers, as he has explains above.
Claude’s
main recipients these days are in Timor-Leste. In
addition to the 10 palettes of stock shipped this January, last year Aspen
Australia also donated eight pallets of pharmaceuticals to Bairo Pite Clinic in
Dili, Timor-Leste’s capital. Supplies are also sent to the Philippines, to Bangladesh
and Myanmar.
When Typhoon
Haiyan caused havoc in the Philippines in 2013, Claude arranged to send medications
there. And he helped after the enormously destructive Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami of 2004 devastated countries
around the Indian Ocean rim.
How
did he get started? Claude says it began when he met some Catholic
nuns who were running a school at Niligiri Hills in southern India. They needed
money to fund operations for children with cleft palates. ‘At first I used to
send them money for the operations,’ he says, adding that disabilities such as
cleft palates and hair lips, if untreated, condemned children to a life of
discrimination. Through these initial steps, Claude began to see he was in a
specially advantaged position to help supply decommissioned pharmaceutical stock
to places where it could do a great deal of good. And he’s still at it.
‘Expired
doesn’t mean that a medicine is toxic or ineffective,’ he says.
‘Sometimes companies over-manufacture, as the cost of manufacture in quantity
is minimal, and they know they can write off donations as tax deductions.’ And
these days medications are not all Claude handles. ‘Sometimes people send clothes, as
well,’ he says. ‘There’s a school in Timor-Leste that receives clothes, not
second-hand, but new, unused clothes’ from a school in New South Wales.
Claude no longer has the pharmacy in Balmain and his
workplace is his home in a leafy suburb of Sydney. When I asked what philosophy
underlay all his endeavours he explained it as, ‘a Christian attitude of
beneficence.’ He went on to say, ‘That’s what makes our society what it is. If
you have a qualification or ability to do something, then you should.’
I salute him for doing
so.
