Critics: PR got in the way of Comfort mission - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Critics: PR got in the way of Comfort mission

BALTIMORE — The Navy hospital ship Comfort succeeded as a public relations tool but fell short of realizing its public health potential during a four-month tour of 12 South and Central American countries, critics say.

The ship’s crew dispensed free medical care to 98,000 people during a voyage that ended Oct. 19, improving and even saving lives under the Bush administration’s “medical diplomacy” initiative.

Yet when it sailed away, the ship often left patients frustrated and its potential unfulfilled because its agenda was dictated by public relations and politics, The (Baltimore) Sun reported in a two-part series ending Monday.

Public health experts said the mission appeared to break some cardinal rules of humanitarian medicine. It didn’t tailor services to the needs of each country it visited, for instance, arriving at each port with essentially the same mix of medicines, equipment and specialists.

And it failed to maximize the ship’s hospital facilities, rarely using sophisticated medical equipment such as its CT scanner and X-ray machines, the Sun reported.

The Comfort is designed to treat as many as 1,000 casualties at a time. But for this mission, just four of the ship’s 12 operating rooms were used, and it carried twice as many public affairs specialists — 14 — as surgeons, the newspaper reported.

Although doctors performed roughly 100 surgeries during five days in each port, they said they were forced to turn away scores of relatively simple surgical cases due to meager provisions for local follow-up care and insufficient time to oversee recovery themselves.

“There’s a lot of medical need down here — simple stuff, really — that we can’t take care of because we’re not here long enough to get into it,” said Navy Cmdr. Timothy F. Donahue, a urological surgeon at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, during a stop in Haiti. “It’s frustrating for all of us.”

Dr. Henry Perry, former director of Haiti’s Albert Schweitzer Hospital, said the $25 million mission could have had a much bigger impact.

“If the ship is a resource that’s available and that the government is willing to use down there, why couldn’t they plan this as an intervention that makes sense instead of just using it as a public relations tool?” he said.

Navy officials say the Comfort’s trip will be the first of many, and that any perceived deficiencies will be considered when the next mission is planned.

“When we get a better sense of the needs and responses, then we can target packages to come in afterward to do the kind of follow-up and longer-term care that we really want to be involved in,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which is responsible for military operations in Latin America.

Bush adviser Karen Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, said the Comfort’s successes and failures will be evaluated with a goal of making the ship “as operational as possible.”

Hughes initiated the Comfort’s medical diplomacy mission after visiting Latin American leaders in 2006 and finding that they felt ignored by the U.S. She said publicity was a central objective of the mission from the start.

“The ship is something that not only can improve people’s lives, but that says, by its presence, ‘America cares,’” she said.

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Critics: PR got in the way of Comfort mission