Meet Mercy
Coastal communities can be geographically close yet difficult to reach with medical personnel and supplies. Mercy provides a mobile platform for bringing care directly to them.
The vessel
A clinic that travels by water.
Roads reach inland. Many of the communities this mission serves are reached more easily from the sea than from the nearest town, and a vessel that can carry clinicians, medications, equipment and supplies removes the hardest part of the logistics problem: getting there at all.
Mercy is not a hospital ship. She is a working platform that puts a volunteer medical team, and the supplies they need, within reach of a shoreline — then moves on to the next community.
Oceans Humanity Project does not yet own Mercy. Her purchase is under way, and OHP has access to the vessel while it completes. OHP was formed to continue the service she has already proven, and completing her purchase is part of what this mission is raising support to do.
Specifications
The accommodation and mission spaces below are taken from the vessel's own documentation. Particulars that have not yet been confirmed against that documentation are listed as pending rather than estimated — a specification page that guesses is worse than one that waits.
Accommodation and mission spaces
| Overnight accommodation | 20 personnel |
|---|---|
| Crew quarters | Dedicated berthing for 8 crew |
| Mission berthing | 12 mission volunteers |
| Galley | Full commercial galley |
| Dining | Dining area seating 12 |
| Laundry | Aboard, for extended missions |
| Below-deck storage | Medical supplies; food and humanitarian aid; equipment and tools |
Those two figures set the shape of a deployment: a mission team of up to twelve volunteers, living aboard alongside eight crew, provisioned and laundered for a stay long enough to work a coastline rather than a single anchorage.
Length overall, beam, draft, displacement, propulsion, range and endurance, and the tender or shore-boat arrangement used to move people and supplies between the vessel and a shoreline without dock facilities.
Mission capabilities
What a mission can accomplish is set by what the vessel can carry, refrigerate, power and sterilize, and by how many clinicians can live aboard while doing it. Those figures determine the size of a medical team and the length of a deployment.
Aboard Mercy, missions conducted under GPA Globalization Ministries delivered:
- Primary care and diagnostics
- Surgical procedures
- Preventive care and screenings
- Distribution of essential medicines and supplies
That is the predecessor organization's record, not Oceans Humanity Project's. It is set out here because it establishes what the vessel has already been used to do — the same range of care OHP's model is built to continue.
Refrigerated and controlled storage capacity for medications; potable water and power generation; sterilization capability; and cargo capacity for supplies carried on a single mission.
History
For more than a decade, Mercy supported humanitarian medical outreach throughout the Caribbean and coastal South America. Volunteer physicians, nurses and maritime professionals lived and worked aboard, partnering with local organizations in the communities they reached.
The ministry that sponsored that work later redirected its resources toward permanent land-based operations, because many of the communities it served were well inland. That was a change in that organization's strategy — not a shortcoming of Mercy, and not a verdict on medical care delivered by sea. Oceans Humanity Project's model returns the focus to coastal and island communities, where arriving by water is the advantage rather than the obstacle.
Mercy's fuller service history, including her role in missions completed under GPA Globalization Ministries, will be set out here. Oceans Humanity Project is a new organization and claims none of that earlier record as its own; the vessel's history is presented as the vessel's.
Build date and builder, prior service and conversion history, when and how the vessel entered maritime medical service, and the missions she has supported to date.
Safety and operation
Oceans Humanity Project's model places formal maritime-safety procedures alongside its clinical, governance and financial procedures. Operational detail is not published, but questions from prospective volunteers, partners and funders are welcome and answered directly.
Photographs
Further photography of Mercy — under way, at anchor, and working alongside a community — will be added as it becomes available.
Questions about the vessel?
Maritime professionals, prospective volunteers and partners are welcome to ask directly — including the questions this page cannot yet answer.
Email the project