A ROYAL Navy medic from Penryn has described her role in helping hundreds of people rescued from their sinking boats in the Mediterranean.

Medical Assistant Morwenna Nichols was one of two trained Royal Navy medics aboard a landing craft from HMS Bulwark which picked up more than 600 people from dinghies of the coast of Libya. On both occasions the ship responded to mayday calls and launched two of her landing craft to help transfer the migrants to safety.

The time the migrants spent onboard the 97ft Royal Marines craft gave the medics a chance to offer assistance to the most needy.

Morwenna and her colleague Scott Duncan were expecting to deal with hundreds of people suffering from the effects of dehydration, exposure to the sun, hunger and possibly hypoglycaemia (a shortage of sugar).

“All of those picked up have been very thirsty but were surprisingly calm," said Morwenna, 26, "Because they had been picked up they were actually in quite high spirits.

"One came up to me to hold my hand and say ‘thank you’. The rest of the women just kept calling me ‘sister.’

“They quickly realised we were here to help them. They were jumping up and down, smiling, waving.”

She and her colleague also tended to one woman who was seven months pregnant and another woman who had been shot about a month earlier in Mogadishu; she had not received any proper medical care but had somehow made the 3,000-mile journey from Somalia to Tripoli to attempt a crossing to Europe.

“The situation on land must be terrible: to sit in a rubber dinghy with little food or water and everywhere you look there is sea,” said Morwenna who has a 16-month-old son, currently at home in the UK with her partner, who is also in the Royal Navy. “These are really desperate people. What would drive them into such a situation?”

Just six days earlier, on the morning of May 1, Morwenna was working in the emergency department at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth as usual. Not 24 hours later she was at RAF Brize Norton boarding an aircraft for Sicily to join Britain’s Flagship as she prepared to sail for her Mediterranean mercy mission.

“I served in Afghanistan, but have never done an operation like this helping ordinary people,” she said. “This has been a brilliant experience. It’s nice to think that we are able to help these people somehow, even in a small way.”