Mobile Medical School ~ New Mercy Ships Role...

I wrote a few weeks about the powerful role of Mercy Ships as rapid infrastructure which offers urgent solutions to pressing challenges. The general mode of Mercy Ships is to perform surgeries and provide healthcare in places with extreme need and little local capacity. It's exciting to see that in their current stint in Cotonou, Benin, the M/V Africa Mercy surgeons and facilities are also serving as a teaching hospital by instructing visiting and local docs in the latest techniques suitable for their problems and conditions. This additional role of the ship as a mobile medical school is hugely important in that they train surgeons who will stay after the ship is gone... And, btw, props to the Alcon Foundation for financially supporting this training program via surgical fellowships. Finally, to get some sense of the scale of both the challenge they face and services the M/V Africa Mercy crew provide, take a look at this Benin "screening day" video...