Marshall Specialist Vehicles - Field Hospitals and Rapid Treatment Centres and Ambulances

Modern conflict requires workspaces and logistic areas including hospitals and medical systems that are protected against EMP, EMC, EMI, IEDs and CBRN as well as blast, fragments and bullets and environmental and climatic challenges. MSV military and security vehicles and protective shelters cover three primary areas: protected workspace (mainly integrated vehicle and ground-based shelters), protected logistics (mainly specialist vehicles and load beds), and capability development including consulting, robotics, UORs, UGVs, UAVs and EOD.

MSV's shelters always include CBRN and are used to protect: people, infrastructure, C3I, satellite and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) ground control stations, and medical systems including hospitals. MSV's unique expanding MATRIX™ shelter allows rapid construction of air transportable infrastructure systems based on ISO 20ft footprints.

Field hospitals and rapid treatment centers

Field hospitals are categorized as Role 1-3. Role 1 is smaller and more easily deployed but less capable than Role 2, which is more easily transported and deployed than Role 3 field hospitals, which are essentially static systems. MSV specialize in designing integrating and building Role 1 and 2 field hospitals. Building a field hospital is a very complex integration problem but deployment in the field must be simple and quick. Field hospitals thus call for innovative design and engineering.

A Role 1 field hospital is designed to provide rapid surgical treatment whilst a Role 2 field hospital is in essence a full district hospital. Most field hospitals are a mix of shelters and tents with the shelters providing the technical core of the hospital and the tents providing the accommodation and other facilities.

A hospital can easily be expanded or contracted to meet the operation situation thus a Role 1 field hospital can be expanded to be a Role 2. Modules of a Role 2 or 3 can be deployed as Role 1 field hospital. Flexibility is the key.

Expandable shelters and transportation containers for field hospitals

MSV’s field hospitals are based around the MSV MATRIX™ double expandable shelter acting as the hospital modules-surgical, high dependency wards, laboratory, pharmacy etc and steel ISO containers acting as the corridors and services conduits. The steel containers also act as transport containers for the rest of the hospital not contained within the expandable modules. Typically there are 26 ISO 20 ft equivalent containers in a field hospital (Role 2) however these can be increased or decreased in number depending on the wishes of the customer.

Regardless of its size and complexity a field hospital has to capable of rapid deployment. The way MSV’s field hospitals are configured ensures that the business end of the hospital - the surgical theatres and supporting elements - can be deployed from their transport system and be in action in less than an hour and a half.

Military ambulances

MSV has a long association with military ambulances. More recently the Land Rover ambulance provided by MSV has does sterling service in many countries in both civil and military guise.

Based on MSV’s acknowledged expertise in ambulance design they were asked to design the ambulance module for the BOXER vehicle produced by ARTEC. Key to this design of military ambulance is the flexible combinations of sitting and stretcher-borne casualties that the ambulance can carry and the assisted loading system designed to load stretcher cases into the vehicle as quickly as possible with minimum exposure of the medical attendants to possible hostile fire.

Other medical equipment

From their work on hospitals and ambulances MSV have a wide range of partnerships with the manufacturers of medical equipments such as plasma and blood warming and patient temperature control devices and stretcher carriage systems that allow almost any transport system to be rigged as an emergency ambulance. The key to these medical equipment systems is they are designed to the same quality standards as MSV designs its own field hospitals and ambulances.

About MSV

Marshall Specialist Vehicles (MSV), part of the Marshall Group - a large privately owned company - is based in Cambridge, UK. Marshall Specialist Vehicles is primarily focused on design, manufacture and engineering of military land systems. Vehicle and shelter systems expertise is complemented by protection, testing, EOD, consultancy, medical systems and by UGV and UAV unattended vehicle capabilities.