Amanda Wallace (Second mate navigator) with patients in A ward.

- by Nancy Predaina, Mercy Ships Editor

Imagine a ship that sails into the poorest nations on earth to deliver world-class health care.  Now imagine that the health care is absolutely free.  This may seem impossible, but this is precisely what the international non-profit, Mercy Ships, does.

Since 1978, Mercy Ships has used hospital ships to deliver state-of-the-art medical care to developing countries.  To date, Mercy Ships has performed services valued at more than $1 billion, impacting about 2.35 million people.

The nations served by Mercy Ships are very carefully selected.  Most rank at the bottom of the Human Development Index (HDI) as measured by the United Nations.  West Africa features predominantly on this index.  Mercy Ships has served numerous African nations including Liberia, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Guinea, The Gambia, and Sierra Leone. Most people in West Africa have heard of the “big white hospital ship.”  In fact, some people wait for months, even years, for the ship to come to their country.  For many people, Mercy Ships is their only hope for medical care.

The M/V Africa Mercy, the current Mercy Ships vessel, is the world’s largest non-governmental hospital ship.  It contains 6 operating rooms, patient wards, ICU/Recovery, CT-scan and X-ray, and a laboratory.  It serves as home to a volunteer crew of 450 individuals from 40 nations.  The crew includes both medical and non-medical personnel who perform a wide range of jobs – surgeons, nurses, teachers, engineers, cooks, etc.  Each individual is one piece in a large community working together with one common goal … to alleviate suffering by helping as many men, women, and children as possible.

Serving with Mercy Ships is a unique and fulfilling way for maritime professionals to use their skills to help change lives!  The maritime crew comes from many countries around the world, volunteering their time and skills to serve with Mercy Ships.  The time of service can be anything from four weeks up to many years.  Often they bring their families with them, and their children may attend the onboard accredited Academy, which provides classes for nursery school through high school.

The maritime crew not only navigate the hospital ship to the countries we serve, but they also keep engines and all vital systems functioning properly so that the state-of-the-art hospital ship can fulfill its mission of transforming lives.  The Africa Mercy offers its patients and crew a comfortable environment with air-conditioning, lighting, hot water, bathrooms, and computers – quite unlike anything available in developing countries.  In addition, a hospital ship requires special equipment that must be maintained – for example, compressors to furnish medical oxygen – and equipment breakdowns must be addressed immediately in order to keep patient care unaffected.  Power and services to the hospital must be uninterrupted as a power outage could endanger patients’ lives.

For many mariners, this experience will be very different from any other maritime experiences they have had.  For example, the ship spends much more time in port – usually ten months – than at sea.  Since the ship serves in developing countries, the crew may encounter unusual situations.  For instance, the main engines and propulsion systems must be ready for sea departure at a moment’s notice in case of political unrest in the host country.  Also, water pollution in the port can clog sea water intakes, which are used for cooling generators and engines.  So, dive teams have to clean the intakes often, sometimes twice a day.

During its service in a country, Mercy Ships focuses on increasing infrastructure not only by providing training for local health care practitioners, but also by training local Africans in some maritime duties.  For example, the Engineering Department has its own special program for transforming lives.  After an interview process, local young men are hired as day-workers to assist in the constant cleaning, painting and watch duties.  They complete a training manual that covers the basics of engine maintenance and cleaning.  They are extremely grateful for the free training that provides a way for them to support themselves after the ship leaves the port. The maritime crew helps create a brighter future for the young men they work with and train.

Amanda Wallace, from California, works for Chevron on tankers.  She volunteered onboard the Africa Mercy for two months, serving as Second Officer.  During her time off, she discovered ways to personally touch lives.  She visited orphanages, where she played games and did crafts with the children.  She visited patients in the Mercy Ships HOPE Center, an off-ship facility where patients recover from surgery or build strength prior to surgery.

One day, Amanda had an opportunity to visit the off-ship Mercy Ships Dental Clinic. For people in developed countries, a visit to the dentist is a common occurrence.  But in West Africa, many people have never been to a dentist, and it can be quite an unnerving experience!  Amanda noticed one particularly nervous man.  To ease his fear, she held his hand while his tooth was extracted.  It was a small act of compassion that made a BIG difference to a fearful dental patient.  Amanda said, “Mercy Ships is pretty well-known throughout the commercial fleet. I was looking for a volunteer opportunity – something that would be positive in my life – where I could use my skills for a bigger picture … to help.”

Captain Tim Tretheway shares that sentiment. He and his family have served with Mercy Ships for 24 years. When asked about his volunteer work onboard the ship, he replied, “This work has made me realize that I don’t have to be a surgeon to have an effect on the world.”

The Africa Mercy is a floating hospital that provides quality health care to some of the world’s most desperate people – bringing hope and healing they never thought possible.  But it could not do so without a hard-working, dedicated maritime crew.

For more information about Mercy Ships, please visit www.mercyships.org or watch the following video, Mercy in Action.  If you’ve sailed with Mercy Ships, please share your experience on the gCaptain Forum HERE.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In October 2009 the Transocean rig Marianas began drilling a well named Macondo, but she suffered damage in a hurricane and was replaced by the Deepwater Horizon. Five months later Macondo exploded killing 11 rig workers and injuring 17 more. But this was not the Marianas’ first brush with disaster.

Originally named the MSV Tharos, the Marianas was built by the famed Red Adair as a firefighting support rig. The rig included space for the launch of helicopters, powerful firefighting equipment and even a 22 bed hospital. These attributes saved lives in July of 1988 when the Piper Alpha production platform exploded in flames and the Tharos was dispatched to rescue survivors.

Today no such platform exists. US Coast Guard officials have testified that launching the first search and rescue helicopter took 24 minutes the night of the Macondo blowout and flight time to the incident location took significantly longer. Once on location, helicopters could only standby for short periods of time before running out of fuel. Eventually the Cutter Zephyr was dispatched to provide a platform for the coordination of efforts but due to her distance from the incident she was slow in arriving.

Last tuesday the oil majors announced a $1 billion plan to build infrastructure and stage equipment for rapid oil spill response in the event of another major blowout. But how much are they spending on infrastructure and equipment for rapid medical and SAR response? Zero.

Maybe it’s time to think broadly on the topic of safety of life offshore and invest in making the workplace safer but also in making lifesaving resources more abundant. Maybe the oil majors should invest $1 billion in an offshore hospital platform complete with advanced firefighting teams, helicopter hanger bays and fueling stations? Or is it too much to expect that injured offshore workers get medical treatment within the golden hour and that helicopters with nightvision, FLIR scanners and other Search and Rescue technology be forward deployed and ready to use?

Just a though. What are your ideas for prevention and response to major emergencies offshore?

By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY

The U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort pulled up anchor Tuesday in Port-au-Prince and began the long trip home to Baltimore, ending its role in Operation Unified Response-Haiti.

The ship’s departure brings to a close a dramatic naval mission launched three days after the Haitian earthquake Jan. 12, when the ship’s crew ended scheduled maintenance midway and set sail to provide medical relief to a nation whose hospitals and clinics lay in ruins.

From Jan. 19 to Feb. 27, doctors treated nearly 1,000 patients, performed 843 surgeries, carried out 37 amputations, repaired dozens of bone fractures and delivered nine babies, says Capt. James Ware, the ship’s commanding officer. By late February, Ware says in an e-mail, the Haitian government began working with the Pan American Health Organization and other groups to improve the medical care on shore “with the ambition of building back to pre-earthquake medical levels.”

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor says the time has come to call the Comfort home. “The doctors on the USNS Comfort did a heroic job treating patients following the earthquake in Haiti and provided essential short-term support, but the Comfort is not a long-term solution,” he says.

• Keep Reading
• gCaptain’s full coverage of Haiti Earthquake

A ship that fueled global anger amongst mariners during World War II was recently found off Australia’s Queensland coast. The BBC tells us:

An Australian World War II hospital ship, the Centaur, has been seen for the first time since it sank more than 60 years ago with a loss of 268 lives.
Images of the wreck, more than 2km (1.3 miles) below the sea, were captured by a remote-controlled underwater camera.

The ship’s location was discovered last month following a hi-tech search.
Australia says the ship, which went down in May 1943, was torpedoed by the Japanese. Japan says the circumstances surrounding its sinking are unclear.

The search team found the ship on 20 December off the Queensland coast, about 30 miles due east of the southern tip of Moreton Island.

Favorable conditions allowed the crew to send down a camera on a remotely-operated submersible vehicle over the weekend. Further dives are planned.

Search director David Mearns told AFP news agency he hoped the images would “hopefully end a 66-year quest for unanswered questions and bring comfort to many families across Australia and beyond”.

Continue reading the full article HERE or visit the Courier’s ongoing coverage of the wreck HERE.

The NY Times reports on unfortunate news from the ship I’d most like to sail on, the Hospital Ship Mercy. They write:

Though countries in Southeast Asia have, with American help, been making some headway against terrorist groups in the region, as Eric Schmitt reported in The New York Times today, there are also “worrisome signs that the threat could rebound quickly,” Mr. Schmitt reported.

Right on cue, then, comes the news today that the United States Navy is calling a halt to a humanitarian mission in Mindanao in the strife-torn southern Philippines because someone shot at and hit one of its helicopters.

The Associated Press reports that the helicopter had flown inland from the U.S.N.S. Mercy, a hospital and relief ship, to pick up 11 passengers, and when it returned to the ship, mechanics found two holes in it:
“The holes appear to be an entry and exit point from a single bullet,” said Cmdr. Jeff A. Davis, a Navy spokesman.

It is unclear if the bullet struck while the passengers were on the helicopter, he said. There were no injuries, and the aircraft’s commander was unaware of any bullet striking the aircraft during the flight, Davis said.

Who would shoot at a helicopter on a humanitarian mission? Continue Reading…

While the ship is owned by the United State’s Military Sealift Command (the civilian branch of the US Navy) and the hospital is staffed primarily by Navy personel the ship itself is run by civilian mariners. In a previous post we write:

The Hospital Ships Comfort and Mercy are maintained in reduced-operating status (ROS), at their homeports, on standby to sail within five days of notification. While on ROS, the ships have only small crews. The Comfort, for example, has 58 Navy personnel and 18 civilian mariners on board, explained her civilian captain, Master Mariner Dean Bradford, in a tour of his vessel.

A full description of the ship’s mission can be found HERE.

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Back in June we brought you the departure of one of our favorite ships, the USNS Comfort hospital ship. You can read that article including ship details HERE. Today PilotOnline has news of the ship’s return to the states. They tell us;

America’s high-tech, smart-bombing Navy could be seeing its future in a pair of hulking former oil tankers and their patchwork crews of civilian and military mariners and medical specialists.

Adm. Gary Roughead, the Navy’s chief of naval operations, on Friday told the crew of the hospital ship Comfort that its four-month cruise points the way toward other medical missions aimed at adding combat prevention to the Navy’s warfare portfolio.

“There’s another part to defending our country and another part to advancing our strategic interests,” he said, “and that’s to reach out to other people and to cooperate with other people.”

Roughead, who took over as chief last month, said fostering international goodwill has always been one of the Navy’s missions. But the Baltimore-based Comfort’s cruise, along with a similar Pacific deployment last year by the San Diego-based hospital ship Mercy, heralds an intensified effort to use the Navy to strengthen America’s image abroad, he said.

The Comfort’s medical staff treated more than 98,000 patients in or offshore from a dozen countries during its voyage, straightening teeth and fixing cleft palates, administering about 32,000 vaccinations, and dispensing more than 24,000 pairs of prescription and reading glasses.

The ship also carried a group of engineers who went ashore in several countries to dig or repair wells and sewage treatment facilities.

Read the full article HERE.