Plug n’ play hospital

Over at Boing Boing, MAKE bud Xeni Jardin has an interview with MSF (aka “Doctors without Borders”) Logistics Supervisor Laurent Dedieu in New York, and Hocine Bouhabib in Haiti, about the inflatable hospitals they’re setting up in Port-au-Prince.

How do you create a surgery center in a disaster zone in the shortest amount of time possible? The aid group Doctors Without Borders (aka Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF) has developed what they call a “plug and play hospital,” a series of inflatable tents with generators and sanitation equipment designed to be mostly independent from the water and power systems typically unavailable after a catastrophe. They are setting up one of these in Haiti right now: 9 tents, 100 beds, including surgery and intensive care areas. And if you think Windows install kits are heavy? This one weighs 41 metric tons.

Haiti: HOWTO set up a plug-and-play hospital – Doctors Without Borders