 The National Emergency Management Organization, NEMO, continues to bolster St. Lucia's disaster preparedness capacity. On August 19, a cohort of first responders comprising fire officers and police officers attached to the Special Service Unit were given the task of mounting and operationalizing the Field Hospital on the grounds of the NEMO headquarters. Field hospitals can be mounted on almost any terrain to provide medical support to areas made isolated as a result of natural or man-made hazards. We can see that in disasters where a hospital may be damaged, whether fully or partially. Even in the case of COVID, we noted in St. Lucia, we had a situation where we had quite a number of persons who were at the respiratory hospital and we were almost at the point of not being able to accommodate more persons. So in that case, this is where you would have to use your Field Hospital. NEMO is ensuring St. Lucia's first responders get crucial hands-on training in mounting a Field Hospital. NEMO's training exercise began at approximately 9am. The participants were given a mock scenario that necessitated the need for a Field Hospital. It is crucial for each member of the team to understand and execute their respective roles to ensure the Field Hospital is mounted and operationalized safely and within the shortest period of time. Once the Field Hospital is up and running, a medical team takes over and can begin triaging and stabilizing patients who may need to be transferred to a primary medical facility for further treatment. This hospital will provide basic primary care services, it will also provide some emergency services. We will do everything that we can get in a primary care setting, we can do dressings, we can do wounds, we can stabilize patients, so it has as much of a hospital function as you can get from a mobile facility. A Field Hospital is a critical and potentially life-saving piece of mobile infrastructure that can be installed in almost any location to provide emergency medical services to augment overwhelmed or otherwise incapacitated hospitals. It is important for us to get the Field Hospital team trained and retrained because you do not want that skill to just disappear. So we felt that it was important to bring them back almost eight months later from the first training so that they can time themselves to see how quickly they can put this together. If for instance we had to deploy part of the hospital overseas, the team that would be going would need to be very familiar with the parts and pieces and put them together. The team completed the exercise in less than three hours. Twenty beds, in addition to lavatory facilities, were installed inside the fully air-conditioned premises. Power to the Field Hospital is supplied by a diesel power generator. The United States Southern Command Humanitarian Assistance Program donated the Forty Bed Field Hospital to the government of St. Lucia in January of this year. The Nemo intends to periodically conduct similar training exercises to a rotating team of first responders and also members of District Disaster Reduction Committees and other local humanitarian agencies. From the office of the Prime Minister, Rihanny Isidou.