A sign of the times?
The Seamen’s Church Institute (SCI) has recently published Preliminary Guidelines: Post-Piracy Care for Seafarers, meant to provide a general structure for the care of seafarers following an incident of piracy and are preliminary to an ongoing study designed to develop more specific recommendations forthcoming in the second half of 2010. The information withink the Preliminary Guidelines is culled from a variety of sources in the professional mental health literature.
About the Piracy Trauma Study:
In conjunction with the Disaster Psychiatry Outreach (DPO) at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Seamen’s Church Institute has developed a multi-year project exploring the clinical assessment and treatment of piracy attack survivors. SCI’s study of the impact of piracy on seafarers and their families is the first of its kind in the maritime industry.
SCI’s program seeks to identify unique stressors of piracy hostage situations, along with immediate and ongoing medical evaluation strategies for crewmembers and their families. Study outcomes include plans for clinically assessing seafarers after piracy incidents, assisting families during prolonged piracy episodes, and triaging short- and long-term mental health treatment.
SCI will update the Preliminary Guidelines, available online at http://www.seamenschurch.org/law-advocacy/piracy-trauma-study and welcomes comments from interested parties in their ongoing efforts to develop specific guidelines to address the mental health impact of piracy on seafarers.
What are your thought’s on this matter?
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Tags: · piracy, seafarers
Every year, the International Maritime Organization chooses a theme for its World Maritime Day, which is generally celebrated during the last week in September. In 2009, the IMO chose “Climate Change” as the theme. This year, 2010, will be named “Year of the Seafarer”. In a message posted to their website, the IMO states:
The International Maritime Organization has decided to dedicate next year to you by choosing, as the theme for World Maritime Day, “2010: Year of the Seafarer”. Our intention is to pay tribute to you, the world’s 1.5 million seafarers – men and women from all over the globe – for the unique, and all too often over-looked, contribution you make to the wellbeing of all of us….
At IMO, we are ever-conscious of the important role you play in helping us achieve safe, secure and efficient shipping on clean oceans – the goals that we, as the United Nations specialized agency charged with the regulation of international shipping and as a member of the global maritime community, have set ourselves.
And so, we will celebrate next year’s World Maritime Day theme with much pride in your contribution to our objectives, to the facilitation of more than 90% of the world’s trade, and to sustainable human development.
You can read the full message from the IMO to the world’s seafarers, HERE.
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Tags: · imo, seafarer, seafarers
Upon arrival in the office this morning, I had the following press release from about 4 people sitting in my inbox. It reads:
The impact of proposed changes to the Jones Act and the use of foreign flagged vessels in the US offshore sector is already being felt by seafarers according to international shipping recruitment agency Faststream, with companies rushing to replace their non-US crews.
Should the proposals by the US Customs and Borders Protection (CBP) first issued in July 2009 be implemented, they would radically change the interpretations of rules for vessels transporting specialised equipment used by the offshore oil and gas industry and revoke foreign flag exemptions to the Jones Act including pipe and cable-laying, diving support work.
“Some of our offshore service companies that we work with are already making moves to man their vessels with US crews in anticipation of the proposed changes,” said Fort Lauderdale based Craig Johnson, President of Faststream’s US operations.
“Foreign crews are being shifted away from the US and replaced with American citizens. We think that around 70 vessels could be affected by these proposals, but there still remains a good deal of uncertainty as to how far these proposals will go. We haven’t as yet seen a jump in salary expectations from crews with salaries remaining relatively stable thus far.” [Continue Reading →]
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Tags: · jobs, Jones Act, Offshore, seafarer, seafarers
The National Maritime Security Advisory Committee (The primary industry advisory committee that provides security policy guidance to the US Coast Guard) has recently engaged in the issue of seafarer’s access to shore leave.
NMSAC was tasked to research the issue and provide guidance to the USCG on the issue. You can read a review of the detailed report they issued here .
In addition, at their May 4 meeting, the Committee passed the following resolution:
“The National Maritime Security Advisory Committee (NMSAC),
Having received, a Task Statement from the United States Coast Guard in June, 2008, requesting NMSAC to examine and quantify the problem of seafarers’ access to shore leave and to provide comments by September 18, 2008,
Convened a Seafarers’ Access working group consisting of representatives that consisted of representatives from Seafarer’s Unions, Seafarer’s Welfare Organizations, Facility owner/operators, Facility Security Officers, and Shipowners Associations,
Having met on September 18, 2008 to discuss, among other items, the findings of the working group, [Continue Reading →]
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Tags: · seafarers, YOUblog
We recently ran across some interesting statistics from a 2005 joint study on manpower from BIMCO and the ISF.
Q: How many officers are currently employed aboard ships? [Continue Reading →]
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Tags: · bimco, Data, Interesting, isf, labour_supply, manpower_issues, Maritime, Maritime Expert, merchant-marine, merchant-navy, oecd_countries, seafarer, seafarers, shipping-industry
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