After a decade of planning, construction, and collaboration from donors and partners around the globe, a brand-new hospital ship built by Mercy Ships has just been launched.
The 174-metre vessel will be used as a floating hospital and training centre with capacity for 950 people on board. It doubles the Mercy Ships fleet.
MSC, which has been supporting Mercy Ships since 2011 through the MSC Foundation, has provided logistics support for the hospital ship, including containers carrying the necessary materials to equip the vessel for service.
It is equipped with six operating theatres, hospital beds for 200 patients, a full laboratory, and simulation training areas enabling thousands of local doctors to be trained in the places the charity serves. Global Mercy will be the site of life-transforming surgery for hundreds of thousands of people in its lifespan and is due to enter service in Africa in January 2023, with a naming ceremony scheduled to take place in Senegal in May 2022.
Mercy Ships is a global charity that uses hospital ships staffed by all-volunteer crews as the most efficient way to deliver projects of free, world-class healthcare services. In 2021 it performed over 3 000 surgical procedures and over 16 000 dental procedures. The organisation also provided medical courses to more than 1 300 participants, and more than 157 000 hours of mentoring to African healthcare professionals. It worked in 11 countries across the continent.
