Expanding operations overseas.

• Position: Triad

Two Winston-Salem-based giants are collaborating to combat illness in a Caribbean country. HanesBrands Inc. and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have teamed up to provide surgical care and improve medical facilities in the Dominican Republic, where the apparel maker has about 7,500 employees at six manufacturing plants. The health-care initiative provides ear, nose and throat surgeries for children at Hospital Pedro de Marchena in Bonao, site of a Hanes-Brands plant that, with 1,800 employees, is one of the largest private employers in the region.

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The partnership grew from discussions about Wake Forest Baptist donating dated but usable medical equipment and supplies to the Bonao hospital. In January, HanesBrands shipped two cargo containers of supplies--including an operating table and anesthesia machines--from Winston-Salem to Bonao. Then in February, Dr. Dale Browne, professor and chairman of the otolaryngology department at Wake Forest Baptist, and Dr. Adele K. Evans, a pediatric otolaryngologist, led a 14-member team to the hospital.

Browne went back in June with a team of a dozen doctors and nurses, performing about 50 tonsillectomies, ear surgeries, cleft-palate procedures and repairs of neck lesions. "We were all kind of shocked how many kids had these problems," Browne says of tonsil and adenoid conditions that could lead to sleep apnea and heart failure. "They had mouths so full of tonsil tissue they couldn't eat, swallow or play." Half the patients were children of HanesBrands employees.

HanesBrands, which has had plants in the Dominican Republic for more than 30 years, began a relationship with the Bonao hospital in 2007, when more than 100 local employees volunteered hundreds of hours to repair the electrical, ventilation and plumbing systems. The company...