Everyone dies. But as an in-home hospice nurse, Owen O'Neill was never really prepared to answer one of the first questions he routinely got from grieving families: "Who can I give this wheelchair to"

He'd suggest they donate the item. But that didn't always work .

So finally, O'Neill agreed to take the wheelchairs, and the hospital beds and the walkers and more, and find new homes for them all.

It was the beginning of a charity unique to Palm Beach County in its mission and scope - one that O'Neill calls Clinics Can Help .

Barry Bicknell and others who have been forced to find medical equipment they can't afford or that insurance won't cover call it something else: a bright spot of humanity in the clinically cold world of medicine.

Bicknell wound up in the Clinics Can Help warehouse in West Palm Beach this spring.

The hospital was about to release his teenage son after a car crash traumatized his brain and left him needing round-the-clock care.

"It was a very scary moment for us as parents," said Bicknell, who quit his job at Seacoast National Bank to care for his son in the family's Stuart home. His wife returned to work for a pharm aceutical firm.

"I went in specifically looking for an overnight feeding machine. Owen said, 'Tell me a little bit about your son.' My son is a traumatic brain injury survivor and I didn't know what he needed," Bicknell said.

But O'Neill did.

"The doctors told me you have to physically turn him in his bed every four hours or he gets bedsores," Bicknell said. "Owen looked at that and said, 'You need an air mattress with an underlying gel mattress. Now you only have to turn him every six hours.' Well, that was huge."

Hospice background helpful

O'Neill knew from experience what Bicknell hadn't yet figured out: The family needed not only the medically necessary equipment for the son, but also equipment that could assist his father in the daunting task of caring for him.

"The doctors at St. Mary's (Medical Center) were wonderful. But they're running a hospital; they're not trying to make a mini-clinic out of my son's bedroom," Bicknell said.

O'Neill helped him do that.

Stocked with medical supplies from a feeding machine to a mattress, Bicknell prepared to leave and pulled out his checkbook.

"How much do I owe you"

"Nothing."

"I just about cried," Bicknell said.

He had insurance. But the insurance company wouldn't pay for items beyond what it deemed medically necessary, even if logistically he couldn't care for his son without them, he said.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 244,000 people in Palm Beach County have no insurance.

And by most accounts, no other charity in the county fills this need by collecting and then donating medical equipment like Clinics Can Help, said Amy Dean, who administers grants for the Palm Healthcare Foundation.

The West Palm Beach-based foundation has given O'Neill's charity $50,000 over 18 months to help cover operating costs, including transportation, office supplies and insurance.

"We thought it was such a clever and resourceful way to meet the needs of folks who couldn't afford the proper equipment, while at the same time really extending the useful life of equipment and supplies," Dean said.

As for O'Neill, she said, "He has a passion and commitment to making sure everybody who needs support to live the maximum quality life gets it."

Local demand for goods high

At first, O'Neill stored the donations in his home.

When that got crowded, he borrowed his girlfriend's garage.

Five years later, he works out of a donated warehouse full to the rafters with hospital beds, wheelchairs, oxygen machines, walkers, patient lifts and more, all donated in hopes the equipment would help someone else.

When he first envisioned Clinics Can Help, O'Neill, 43, aimed for a global market.

The career nurse with nine years of hospice experience could see Clinics Can Help shipping its donated walkers and wheelchairs to countries such as Haiti and Kenya, and he did manage some long-distance donations early on.

"But I just kept getting calls for help closer to home," O'Neill said.

Working through charities and social workers, Clinics Can Help this year has donated more than 100 wheelchairs, 20 home hospital beds, 12 electric wheelchairs and more, O'Neill said.

A week before Thanksgiving, its warehouse held about 35 wheelchairs and 11 hospital beds, as well as a couple of crank-and-sling contraptions that lift patients out of beds and wheelchairs. He also has shelves of nebulizers and oxygen concentration machines.

Paying out of pocket for a wheelchair can cost up to $1,000 depending on the model needed. A hospital bed can go for up to $2,000. And a patient lift is worth about $600, O'Neill said.

Without some of these items, a patient may be doomed to return to the hospital, said O'Neill, who still works as a hospice nurse each weekend. Only this year was he able, through a two-year, $60,000 grant from Quantum Foundation, to pay himself and one employee at the warehouse.

"If you're trying to help dad recover from, say, a stroke, he needs a hospital bed, a wheelchair and a nebulizer, just so he can recover," O'Neill said. "Trust me. If he doesn't have the equipment, he'll be back in the hospital."

Some churches have donation closets with a walker or a wheelchair, but O'Neill's warehouse runs considerably deeper. And if he doesn't have it, he can sometimes find it.

He said he even managed to track down a medical van a couple of weeks back for a boy with muscular dystrophy.

Said O'Neill: "Working in hospice you really get the point you're not going to live forever, so the work you do now is very important."