Guest speaker: Fay Veitch from Mercy Ships

 

Mercy Ships is an international NGO that operates the world’s largest civilian hospital ships. Founded in 1978 by Don Stephens, Mercy Ships provides free, life-changing or life-saving surgical and medical care to coastal regions where access to safe surgery is limited or non-existent. They operate a two-ship fleet: the Global Mercy which is the world’s largest civilian hospital ship, designed specifically for surgeries, training, and patient recovery. And the Africa Mercy, a converted railway ferry turned into a specialised floating hospital.

 

Medical professionals perform procedures at no cost to patients, including maxillofacial (such as tumor and cleft lip/palate repairs), orthopedic, general, ophthalmic (cataracts), and women’s health (obstetric fistulas) surgeries.

 

The ships are staffed almost entirely by an international crew of unpaid volunteers, including surgeons, nurses, maritime officers, teachers, cooks, and engineers.

 

In order to determined where the ships will travel to, a decision is made at the HQ in Geneva two years before. Those next two years are spent on tasks such as extensive negotiation with the government concerned (to rule out potential risks, corruption interference and more), and forward planning. This includes a team that is dispatched to the destination to assess buildings as close to the port as possible, to provide care such as rehab, blood drawing more more.

 

About 60% of the medical work is done on the ships, the remainder is typically land based.

 

For a 12 month cycle, the ship is in the destination country for 10 months. The other two months include sailing to the Canary Islands for maintenance, before the next sail.

 

We are very proud to support Mercy Ships as one of our International Service projects at Pascoe Vale Rotary.

 

Thank you Fay for visiting our club!

 

To learn more about Mercy Ships, please visit https://mercyships.org.au/