The Samaritan’s Purse 757 cargo plane touched down in Calgary early Tuesday morning, March 19, delivering a brand new emergency field hospital to increase their global medical response capacity. Soon after, the Samaritan’s Purse DC-8 arrived in Calgary with more equipment.
“It was a pretty historic day today,” said Airdrie resident Brent Davis, who is the Samaritan’s Purse director of Canadian ministry projects. “This is the first time that a field hospital of this magnitude has been warehoused here in Canada for international deployment. [It’s] something that we can be proud of here in Alberta, but also as Canadians.”
The tent facility is to be stored in the international Christian relief organization’s warehouse. It has customizable units including an emergency room, laboratory, surgical facilities, and more for inpatient and outpatient care in the event of an international crisis.
The tents can serve more than 200 patients and house 15-30 surgeries every day in a disaster area.
What having the field hospital stored in Calgary allows the organization to do is a quicker deployment to major emergencies and disasters globally.
‘We can deploy directly from Canada,” Davis said. “It's in our warehouse, which is really just steps away from the Calgary International Airport, and so we can mobilize quickly now, both with emergency medical personnel and also with medical assets.”
Davis explained that they have an active roster of medical professionals across Canada, which is augmented with international medical professionals upon deployment to specific disasters.
“These are all folks that come together and attempt to meet the need in whatever context we're serving,” he said.
The organization has a history of quickly responding to disasters, conflicts, and disease outbreaks with Canadian medical professionals, he added.
“I've been with Samaritan's Purse for 17 years and I’ve been an Airdrie resident for 15,” Davis said. “It's been incredible to watch the organization grow.”
He started working with Samaritan’s Purse in the infancy of its medical response.
The most notable response he was involved in was in Haiti post-earthquake in 2010, he said.
“At that time, we were sending medical professionals, but we didn't have infrastructure to send, and it wasn't until 2016 that we were able to send our first field hospital,” Davis said.
While they could send skilled personnel, not having a space to operate was quite challenging, he said. It was important to be able to provide that infrastructure in order to be self-sufficient and deploy wherever the need is, despite the existing infrastructure available.
“It's been a lot of fun to grow with the organization as we've grown into new areas of response,” Davis said.
Early in his career, he travelled a lot with the organization, including to Peru post-earthquake, Nepal post-earthquake, Greece with the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, and more. His role has since shifted to be more domestic and he now leads a team that responds to disasters within Canada, including floods, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other impacts on Canadian communities.
He was active last year with the wildfire activity in BC, as well as northern Alberta and Nova Scotia.
While the new field hospital is earmarked for international use only, the notion that international response is expanding is a good sign.
This new field hospital is one of five now owned by Samaritan’s Purse, which have been deployed more than 20 times, starting in Ecuador in 2016.
It has provided emergency medical relief to tens of thousands of patients in disaster-stricken areas including war-torn Ukraine, Turkey following a deadly earthquake, and Iraq in the midst of the conflict in Mosul.
Davis added that field hospitals were deployed globally during COVID-19 in Italy, as well as Central Park in New York City to handle the hospital overflow.
Since 1973, Samaritan’s Purse Canada has been providing relief around the world in Jesus’ name, including food, water, and temporary shelter for victims of war, poverty, disease, and natural disasters.
Samaritan’s Purse is a Christian relief and development organization that takes its name from Jesus Christ’s biblical story of the Good Samaritan.
Visit SamaritansPurse.ca for more information.