Uh huh...but what do you DO?

Though most people are too polite to directly ask that question, you may be wondering what we do here in the Mercy Ships Maritime Training Center.  I'll be adding a snippet from time to time highlighting an aspect of our responsibilities here.

First and foremost, we exist to ensure that the maritime professionals who keep the ship (and soon to be ships) safe and running smoothly are appropriately and adequately trained for their roles.  There are a number of reasons to use a ship as a delivery platform, and perhaps that can be a topic for a future post.  For now, suffice it so say that 30+ years have proven this to be a very effective model for running a hospital in developing nations (read: poor land-based infrastructure).

We provide some of the training to our maritime staff internally and some is farmed out to training centers that offer courses that we don't/can't.  Either way there is much that goes into the process from an administrative/logistical perspective.  The below process flow chart is something I recently created to help us better visualize the process and work toward a shared web-based workflow.  Many of the sub-processes are workflows in and of themselves (e.g. purchase orders and certificate generation) but this provides a visual overview of what goes into getting someone into a course and tracking the relevant data.