Philly Shipyard won a contract to study designs to replace the two current Navy hospital ships by Leidos’ [LDOS] Gibbs & Cox.
The award, announced July 12, will entail Philly Shipyard performing a six-month design study of a solution for preliminary designs to replace the current hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort.
The hospital ships are owned by the Navy and operated by Military Sealift Command with a mixture of Navy and civilian sailors.
Both ships are converted San Clemente-class oil tankers with 1,000 beds and provide afloat, mobile, acute surgical medical facilities when called upon to the military as well as supporting disaster relief and humanitarian operations.
The current ships have been in service since the 1980s.
Philly Shipyard is subcontracting with Vard Marine Inc. to help provide engineering and technical services for the contract.
“Along with our current commercial and government backlog of shipbuilding projects, we have completed previous design studies for the U.S. Navy and are very interested in pursuing government opportunities that fit our production delivery cycles and skill sets. We are excited and grateful to team up, once again, with Vard Marine on this important industry study,” Steinar Nerbovik, Philly Shipyard president and CEO, said in a statement.
The company also said it and Vard will leverage design work they performed as part of a special study completed for the Navy’s Common Hull Auxiliary Multi-Mission Platform (CHAMP) program, which it won in 2019.
The Navy is still weighing its options on how to replace the two hospital ships. The newest Spearhead-class Expeditionary Fast Transport ships (EPFs) the Navy is buying are modified as EPF Flight II ships with Role 2E increased medical capabilities. The first Flight II EPF will be the future USNS Cody (EPF-14) (Defense Daily, Feb. 24).
They will be succeeded by further modified vessels called Expeditionary Medical Ships (EMS).
The EMS will include a shallow draft to interface with austere ports, a flight deck to accommodate helicopters, and a full range of medical capabilities including three operating rooms, a medical laboratory, radiological capability, blood bank, primary care, rapid stabilization and combat search and rescue with recovery at sea.
The Navy has called the EMS’ mission as “high-speed forward deployed medical ship is to provide rapid responsive sea-based and near-shore hospital level critical care, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, non-combatant evacuation operations and special operations.”
Navy officials compare the EMS to ambulances as opposed to the Mercy-class ships as hospitals.
The EMS will be able to travel at up to 30 knots with a range of 5,500 nautical miles. Earlier this year, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro named the first EMS, as the future USNS Bethesda (EMS-1), named after the National Naval Medical Center Bethesda, Md.(Defense Daily, May 12).