STENA RORO BUILDING WORLD'S LARGEST CIVILIAN HOSPITAL SHIP

The Global Mercy is classified as a passenger vessel, designed for 500 passengers at sea and about 1,000 persons in port when used as a hospital. The ship is based on Stena RoRo’s RoPax concept Stena Seabird, and the flexibility of the concept will be particularly useful.     

“Where there’s usually a car deck, we’re building a hospital with six fully equipped operating theatres,” says Per Westling, CEO for Stena RoRo. “The project is unique with extremely stringent demands on flexibility and quality, and it is a joint undertaking by several European and Asian companies. We have experienced personnel on site monitoring construction and we’re quite happy with the results to date. It feels good that we’ve been able to contribute with our expertise on a project this important.” 

The equipment phase has now begun, initial painting both inside and outside has been completed and the ship can soon start its generators that will produce the necessary power both for propulsion and hospital equipment. 

QUALITY ASSURANCE IS UNIQUE

“We’ve constructed a 600 m², two-storey mock-up,” says Staffan Stenfelt, New-building Manager at Stena RoRo. “The prototypes of physical environments we’ve created enable us to see everything in detail, and we can check both appearance and functions before implementation onboard. If anything needs to be adjusted, this can be done early on.”

FREE MEDICAL CARE FROM MERCY SHIPS

Mercy Ships has offered free medical care to the world’s most needy for more than 40 years. The present hospital ship, the Africa Mercy, is out ten months at a time, calling on ports along the African coast to provide medical and dental care. The ship has been in Dakar, Senegal since August. By training local personnel, help is also provided to the nations visited in building up their own medical capacity.  

“With the new ship, we can more than double our assistance to the poorest of the poor with life-changing operations,” says Tomas Fransson, head of Mercy Ships’ Swedish organisation. “Our work is based on the efforts of volunteers, and once the Global Mercy is deployed, we’ll need twice as many as before. Although this naturally applies primarily to medical personnel, we also need people with many other skills, such as engineers and food service workers.” 

The ship has space for 199 patients and more than 600 staff members. There are six operating theatres and the total area is about 30,000 m². The Global Mercy is scheduled for completion in about one year.