Army mobile surgery tent at cutting edge

By Mathew Dearnaley

Army medics are about to carve a therapeutic swath through the Pacific with a long-awaited mobile surgery.

The air-conditioned tented unit, able to be packed up and carried with its 28-member medical team in a single C-130 Hercules aircraft, will have its first overseas outing at a major defence exercise in the Solomon Islands in May.

Up to 100 Solomon Islanders will be in line for general surgical operations during the exercise, in which New Zealand Army engineers will also renovate schools, water supplies and medical facilities.

The exercise, part of a Government programme of mutual assistance to the Pacific, will see about 145 combat and support troops practising low-level military operations in a tropical environment.

Yesterday it was the turn of military patients to submit to the surgeon's knife when the unit was set up for elective operations at an open day at Linton Army Camp, near Palmerston North.

Capable of life- and limb-saving surgery, it includes an operating theatre, two-bed intensive care unit, laboratory, five-bed medium-dependency surgical ward, 10-bed recovery area and x-ray machine.

Although under canvas, the operating theatre and intensive-care unit are completely sealed, air-conditioned units, as is the laboratory.

A silver-white lining designed to maintain temperature differences and enhance lighting gives the cruciform surgery a spacecraft feel, worlds away from the crude medical facilities immortalised in the television series M.A.S.H.

Its medical team includes an orthopaedic surgeon and a general surgeon, who are consultants in their own right in civilian hospitals while under contract to leave New Zealand on 72 hours' notice with the Army.

Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Anne Schaab, head of the Army's 2nd Field Hospital, said a new emphasis on mobile warfare had highlighted a need for a compact and mobile surgical unit. It would be ready to arrive at a battlefield with the first wave of combat troops and was also ideally suited to cope with natural disasters in the South Pacific, although it would have to be resupplied after 48 hours.

Until now, Army medics sent overseas on missions such as to the 1991 Gulf War and the tsunami disaster zone in Papua New Guinea last year relied on allies to supply medical equipment in the field.

Pictured: Soldiers at Linton benefit from elective surgery in the Army's new mobile surgery unit, which will soon be operating in very different conditions in the Pacific. HERALD PICTURE / MARK MITCHELL