Hospital Ship - U.S. Navy Hospital Ships

U.S. Navy Hospital Ships

The first purposely built hospital ship in the US Navy was the USS Relief which was commissioned in 1921. Most hospital ships in the US Navy during WW2 were converted passenger liners. And most were not marked as neither the Japanese or Germans were concerned with the Hague Convention on hospital ships.

The U.S. Navy's two current hospital ships, the USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) and USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), are operated by Military Sealift Command. Their primary mission is to provide emergency on-site care for U.S. combatant forces deployed in war or other operations. The ships' secondary mission is to provide full hospital services to support U.S. disaster relief and humanitarian operations worldwide.

Each ship contains 12 fully equipped operating rooms, a 1,000-bed hospital facility, digital radiological services, a medical laboratory, a pharmacy, an optometry lab, an intensive care ward, dental services, a CT scanner, a morgue, and two oxygen-producing plants. Each ship is equipped with a helicopter deck capable of landing large military helicopters. The ships also have side ports to take on patients at sea.

The ships are converted San Clemente-class supertankers. Mercy was delivered in 1986 and Comfort in 1987. Normally, the ships are kept in a reduced operating status in Baltimore, Maryland, and San Diego, California, by a small crew of civil service mariners and active-duty Navy medical and support personnel. Each ship can be fully activated and crewed within five days. For example, the Comfort departed Baltimore for Haiti on January 16, 2010, to provide relief to victims of the country's massive earthquake four days after it hit.