Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Navy Hospital Ship named Peace Ark is scheduled to visit Bangladesh from August 19-25 to provide free medical services to local people and conduct academic exchanges with Bangladesh military hospitals. Senior Colonel Zhang Wei, military attaché at the Chinese Embassy,revealed this at a press conference on the embassy premises on Monday.
“The visit is also part of “Mission Harmony-2013” undertaken by PLA Navy to advocate China’s philosophy of “Harmonious World” and “Harmonious Ocean”. The purpose of the visit is to provide free medical service to the local people and conduct academic exchanges with Bangladesh military hospitals,” he said.
The military attaché said that this would be the second Bangladesh visit of the Peace Ark, which will station at the Chittagong port jetty during its stay.
In November 2010, Peace Ark paid a successful visit to Chittagong and provided medical service to thousands of local people, he said.
Peace Ark is designed and built exclusively with Chinese technology. Launched in December 2008, Peace Ark is 178 meters long, 24 meters wide, 35.5 meters high with a displacement of 14,300 tonnes.
The ship is unarmed and painted white with red crosses to conform to the Geneva Convention criteria for a civilian hospital ship. Peace Ark is well equipped with medical facilities. It has seven medical offices, eight nurse rooms, eight operation rooms and 300 beds. It has the capacity to accommodate 40 major surgeries a day – about as many as a large hospital in Beijing.
It has a burn ward, bacteria-free ward, ICU, X-ray room, CT room, Doppler Ultrasound room, dental room and information center. There are 102 medical crew including 46 doctors onboard, among the doctors 15 of them have a degree of PHD and above.
Their specialty ranges from surgery, internal medicine, gynecology, ENT to traditional Chinese medicine and so on. Over the past five years, Peace Ark has carried out three major overseas missions covering Asia, Africa and Latin America. It has undertaken the tasks of international humanitarian relief, emergency disaster relief, medical exchanges and cooperation with other countries.
-With The Independent input
