Comfort mission: Public health or public relations?

Some say the Comfort’s biggest draw is as an enormous symbol, more than its being an efficient means of helping ill people.


Comfort mission: Public health or public relations?
By Chris Amos - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Nov 26, 2007 6:08:31 EST

BALTIMORE — The hospital ship Comfort has operating rooms, a dental clinic, intensive care and neonatal care units, some of the most sophisticated medical imaging equipment in the world, and a flight deck that can accommodate the world’s largest helicopters.

On a wall near its quarterdeck are plaques and certificates from foreign governments visited on its recent four-month humanitarian deployment to 12 Caribbean and Latin American countries. On another wall there are pictures of a sailor playing basketball with Colombian children and a foreign man waving an American flag.

Navy medical officers familiar with the deployment say the photos and plaques — and not Comfort’s array of medical equipment — are the reason the ship is still in service, and the reason that Comfort, and not a smaller Navy ship with better logistical capability, was sent on the humanitarian deployment this summer.

Those officers said the deployment was more about sending a big white ship with 60-foot-wide red crosses on its sides into foreign waters than about finding the most effective way to treat sick people. But others say that although Comfort’s resources could have been used more efficiently, the fact that the deployment helped thousands of people who would not otherwise have been helped was a plus for those people and for the reputation of the U.S.

“Ships like the Comfort have the capacity to do a level of sophisticated care that just doesn’t exist in a number of these countries,” said Gilbert Burnham, a professor of international health at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The poorer strata of society are not going to have access to sophisticated resources Comfort can provide.”

Nobody disputes that good was done during the deployment. More than 500 American military and civilian health care personnel, and smaller groups from Canada and several Caribbean and Latin American nations, treated more than 98,000 patients, performed 1,170 surgeries, administered 32,322 immunizations and dispensed 122,245 prescriptions and 24,242 pairs of eyeglasses.


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2007/11/navy_comfort_071125w/