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USNS Comfort Offers Medical Services in Tumaco, Colombia

Navy NewsStand

Story Number: NNS090610-13
Release Date: 6/10/2009 4:24:00 PM

By Airman 1st Class Danielle Grannan, Continuing Promise Public Affairs

TUMACO, Colombia (NNS) -- U.S. military and interagency personnel, nongovernmental agency volunteers and partner nation teams embarked on Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) are offering free medical, dental, veterinary, engineering and educational services here during Continuing Promise 2009.

Most medical services are being performed at the temporary medical site at the Max Seidel school. However, the ship is equipped with five operating rooms, 250 patient beds, x-ray machines, a CAT scan unit and pharmacy among other services for those patients being treated on board.

"I work in the intensive care on the ship performing post-surgical care for patients," said Leading Seaman Robert Morgan, a member of the Canadian Armed Forces currently assigned aboard Comfort. "When I'm not working on the ship, I'm at the medical sites working with the public."

CP09 is a four-month humanitarian and civic assistance mission through Latin America and the Caribbean. Comfort is scheduled to be in Tumaco until June 17 when it will travel to El Salvador and then Nicaragua.

Comfort's crew offers community members services such as teeth cleanings and extractions, eye exams and glasses and adult and pediatric medical exams. Surgical screenings have also been performed and more than 200 surgical procedures have been scheduled. Surgeries began today.

Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Leslye Ruiz, a preventive medicine technician aboard Comfort, has been conducting health assessment questionnaires.

"We're trying to assess the needs of the people here in Tumaco so that we know exactly what they need on the next Continuing Promise mission," she said.

For more new from Continuing Promise, visit www.navy.mil/local/cp.