By: Kevin
Some of you might be wondering why we have not posted anything to our blog in a while. Well, due to operational security I have been holding off publishing a number of posts detailing my travels over the past year. Now that my travels have drawn to a close, I am ready to release a number of posts in quick succession. While they are actually being released very closely together, I am posting them with the date I was in each country for historical reference.
Back story: In October 2024 I was personally requested (recruited) to be the Medical Emergency Management planner for the largest multi-national humanitarian and disaster preparedness mission in the Pacific. The name of the mission is Pacific Partnership, and has now completed its 21st year. Some years the mission utilizes the big white hospital ship, USNS Mercy, and other years it uses a gray hull Navy ship. This year was a gray hull year. We sailed the pacific on the USS Pearl Harbor for the first few countries, then switched to a different ship, the USS John L. Canley for the second half of the mission due to the Pearl Harbor’s other commitments elsewhere.
Of course, to work on the planning team and take part in the mission itself, it meant stepping down from my Assistant Department Head position at the Naval Hospital to take on the challenges of planning and executing a 6-month long mission.
As a medical planner I visited the countries we would be going to during mission ahead of time and met with host nation leaders to start shaping this year’s mission and what engagements we could do during our time in each country. These visits are called Pre-Deployment Site Surveys, or PDSS. Pacific Partnership only comes to countries by invitation of the host nation, so it is vitally important to determine what engagements the host nation wants and not just tell them what we are planning to do. To accomplish this task, I flew back and forth across multiple time zones during the early spring of 2025 to visit Palau, Vanuatu, and the Kingdom of Tonga, staying a few weeks in each one. I met with hospital administrators, local Red Cross offices, Non-Governmental Organizations, and international aid groups to name just a few. Our team established what supplies would need to be ordered, scoped out engagement venues, clarified medical credentialing requirements to treat patients in each country, and exchanged contact information with host nation representatives in order to continue honing our plans over the months between our pre-deployment site surveys and the mission itself. While we had small teams at each country survey, our larger planning team conducted all business virtually since we had planners located from Florida to Japan and everywhere in between. As the mission drew closer, the amount of time needed for mission planning steadily increased until May of 2025 when I became full-time mission staff. I attended an in-person planning conference in Washington state, and another in Honolulu, HI meeting with key leadership not only from the United States, but also from partner nations such as Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Singapore, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of South Korea.
At the end of June, it was finally time to put all our planning to the test as we sailed out of San Diego Bay headed west to Hawaii for supply on-load, and then to our first mission stop, Papua New Guinea.
The Ready Rovers 