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Navy Surgeon General Visits Naval Construction Battalion Center Gulfport

Navy NewsStand

Story Number: NNS101021-11
10/21/2010

From Bureau of Medicine and Surgery Public Affairs

GULFPORT, Miss. (NNS) -- The Navy and Marine Corps top medical officer visited Naval Construction Battalion Center (NCBC) Gulfport Oct. 19 during his tour of Navy medical facilities in the Gulf Coast.

Navy Surgeon General Vice Adm. Adam M. Robinson, Jr. toured the Naval Branch Health Clinic Gulfport (NBHC) and spoke with Navy medical teams about the importance of supporting force readiness while providing quality patient and family centered care.

NBHC Gulfport – a satellite facility of Naval Hospital Pensacola, Fla. – serves a highly deployable military population. NCBC Gulfport is a fleet concentration area for Seabees and one of only two homeport locations for operational battalions. NBHC Gulfport provides medical support to Naval Mobilization Processing Site (NMPS) Gulfport which is one of four mobilization sites in the United States that prepares Sailors for deployment. Naval Hospital Pensacola has stationed more than 80 medical staff to provide pre and post deployment healthcare to deploying Sailors at the local NMPS processing between 5,000 and 6,000 individuals annually.

"The role of Navy Medicine is to support the warfighter by providing expeditionary medical care to our forces worldwide while simultaneously assuring our deployed Sailors and Marines that their families back home will be well cared for in their absence," said Robinson.

Navy Medicine also plays a large role in providing individual augmentees to support all military services in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other areas around the world in support of ongoing or emergent operations.

Naval Hospital Pensacola – and its 10 branch clinics, including Gulfport – have deployed nearly 1,700 personnel over the past seven years; and on any given day, the command has 10 percent of its staff serving in such locales as Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Sierra Leone, the Horn of Africa, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

While in Gulfport, Robinson also discussed plans under development for a new 57,000 square foot medical facility that will be a replacement for the existing clinic and consolidate all existing base medical care into one new state-of-the-art facility while also adding some new capabilities such as a sports medicine center.

"This upgraded facility will be very appreciated here by the Gulfport community," said Lt Cmdr. Cristi Peck, officer in charge of the clinic. "It will nearly double the size of the current clinic and centralize all care under one roof allowing us to bolster efficiency and provide more services to our beneficiaries."

The design phase for the new $27 million medical facility will start in November 2010 with construction expected to begin in 2013.