The International Medical Corps in Los Angeles and FedEx Express partnered on a 50-ton portable emergency response hospital that can be transported around the world to provide medical assistance following a natural disaster, according to The Commercial Appeal.
Officials said the mobile hospital unit is stored in containers and can be strapped to three flatbed trucks and two trailers when deployed. The organizations said it can be transported anywhere in the world within 72 hours.
The unit contains 12 shelters and stretchers equaling the approximate size of a football field when fully deployed. The space can accommodate 300 surgeries or 6,000 outpatient consultations in one month. Officials said the facility is completely donor-funded and "fairly self-sufficient" during the first four weeks after a disaster. The hospital also does not rely on existing infrastructure, as it comes with its own waste management system, generators and food, according to the report.
Created in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, officials said the full hospital has never been deployed because "there hasn't been a disaster that's warranted the size and scope of [the] hospital," according to the report.
Prior to the partnership, the mobile hospital could only be deployed as a whole unit. Now, officials can send individual sections to various locations.
"We really wanted to have something that was more mobile and flexible that would allow us to deploy to smaller disasters like Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 or the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, where we could use pieces of this instead of the whole thing," said Erica Tavares, senior director of institutional advancement at the International Medical Corps. "It hasn't been packed that way, so it was all or nothing."