KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Members from the NMLC and NEMSCOM joint team that traveled to Afghanistan in April 2010 to unpack and set up the equipment for the new brick and mortar NATO Role 3 hospital in Kandahar, (L – R) Senior Chief HMCS David Ludwig, HM2 Kimberly Abrecht, Senior Chief BUCS Jeffrey Ayres, and HM3 Cole. The team is assessing the pallets and equipment that were color coded prior to shipment for ease in unpacking and setting up. Photo from the NEMSCOM archive gallery.
A Role 3 hospital is designed primarily to provide short-term critical care for coalition military. Stays from five to seven days are the norm unless immediate evacuation is required. In addition to coalition military forces, the hospital also serves civilian contract personnel, and Afghan soldiers, police and civilians. “Medicine doesn’t select who they are or aren’t going to treat,” said Hartmann. "Everyone who comes to that door who is in need of care is treated the same. As NMLC was working on equipment purchases, a team from NEMSCOM, led by Medical design department Head, Lt. j.g. LaMont Simmons, traveled to Kandahar to meet with the hospital commander and his directors to analyze each hospital function to better identify equivalent assemblages from the current EMF designs that could be utilized.
FALL 2010
“Because we do EMF’s, it wasn’t what the doctors were used to,” said Simmons. "We had to be creative to mix and match what we had available to what they needed." Simmons and his team design the medical facilities for the EMFs, integrating operating rooms, radiology units, intensive and acute care wards, laboratories and pharmacies into shipping containers that can be loaded aboard ships and sent anywhere in the world. Because of limited staging areas at the site, as well as a mission-critical timeline to establish the new hospital, all the equipment ordered was received, identified, marked by location where it would be installed in the new facility, packaged, prepared for shipment and placed aboard one of the 15 aircraft used to transport this hospital to its current location.
NEMSCOM and NMLC sent an eight-person team to Kandahar in April 2010 to meet up with the initial materiel shipments, unpack them, assemble them in their assigned location and ensure that everything was working. Of the original requirements identified for the hospital, 99.5 percent were shipped with the initial order. There have been constant additions, and NEMSCOM is still shipping items to meet emerging requirements. The hospital in Kandahar is open and seeing patients. The hospital will transition from its initial outfitting phase to a steadier sustainment phase of operations within the next month. On May 24, 2010, approximately one month after the hospital opened its doors to receive patients there was an attack on the Kandahar airbase. “Timing is everything,” said Simmons.
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