USCG Issues Mariner Licensing & Documentation Program Performance Update; but Mariners Weighing in, Too

Overall message of December 2008 report shows improving services to mariners being dampened by worsening delays in processing medical reviews; mariners beginning to complain.

In the same week that the U.S. Coast Guard’s National Maritime Center issued its regular “Program Performance Update” to the U.S. maritime community, mounting complaints are being heard from mariners who are experiencing significant delays to their documentation processes. Characterized by some as “Huge Backlogs at the National Maritime Center,” the reports (from multiple mariners) are threatening to drown out the “good news” being trumpeted by the Coast Guard.

According to the Coast Guard’s own report, dated December 2008, “…the average time to conduct medical evaluations has increased dramatically to an average of 89 days. This is due to an increase in the number of physical exam reports submitted by mariners and to a limited number of medically trained staff available to make fitness for duty determinations.” The report goes on to say that Coast Guard efforts are underway to “address staffing demands.” The Coast Guard’s NMC commander told MarEx today that the average turnaround time for all documents is about 80 days right now, but that much of that time could be eliminated once the medical review processes are ironed out.

As accusations, responses and reports fly back and forth between mariners and the Coast Guard, the sense that things are not going as smoothly as the Coast Guard would have hoped is becoming more focused. Still, an E-mail from James Cavo sent to an online maritime academy “chat” site said, “If you passed the test, you are not going to wait weeks to have the license issued. The average time from passing a license exam to putting the license in the mail is less than one day. There may be delays and certainly room for improvement, but there is no appreciable delay or bottleneck from passing a license exam to issuing the license." Cavo is the Chief, Mariner Training & Assessment Division at the NMC.

Also obtained this week by MarEx – from Coast Guard sources – was a statement attributed to the “Commanding Officer of the NMC,” Captain David Stalfort. Stalfort says (of the new medical evaluation process), “While we're working on increasing staffing, we've made changes to our process. On October 1, we implemented a new process to help streamline medical evaluations. We now have a medical prescreening process, which occurs immediately after the security screening when the application arrives at NMC. This prescreening process identifies applicants that do not have medical conditions requiring further review. This new process is now routing as many as 50% of the incoming applications directly to the next stage of the evaluation process, which bypasses the medical branch, reduces the medical inventory and speeds up the process."

He went on to say, "For the remaining 50% of applications that must go to the medical evaluation branch, we've adopted strict standards that these physical exams must be evaluated by medically trained evaluators to ensure public safety. The medical staff has implemented a triage system - similar to what is used in hospital emergency rooms. A team of medical screeners review the applications coming from the pre-screening and determine if the application needs to be routed to the physicians for evaluation or if the mariners medical condition is within acceptable risks and can therefore be routed to the next stage of production. This has also reduced the inventory in medical evaluation and will speed up processing."

Nevertheless, one mariner told MarEx this week that he was being forced to seek shoreside employment in the face of expiring credentials and no hope of seeing his documents any time soon. Another told of an application accepted by the Coast Guard on 23 September 2008 and was still pending. His multiple requests for expedited “special handling” had been repeatedly denied. We contacted the Coast Guard’s NMC for comment on these complaints and Commanding Officer David Stalfort responded with information, solutions and goals.

Stalfort claims that the NMC receives about 370 applications for credentials daily. About 155 of these applications go directly to processing after a pre-screening procedure and another 185 go directly to what he calls “the medical shop.” There, a team of 7 licensed medical professionals (Doctors, PA’s and Nurses) pore through the files. About 60 of these applications end up going to the physician for additional medical screening. He goes on to say that if the proper information has been received in accordance with NAVC 04-08, these documents can be moved through the system in a day, but the tremendous backlog of applications in place before the new system took effect is slowing that process. Stalfort also said that NMC was drawing upon internal medical resources elsewhere in the Coast Guard family to reduce these delays and it was his goal to augment the current team by at least three additional billets in the near future.

As for quantifying the delays being experienced by mariners in all cases, Stalfort lays at least some of that blame (as much as 29 percent of delays) at the feet of the applicants themselves, who often omit required information when submitting their applications. But MarEx pressed him on the fact that the local REC “help centers” were supposed to be largely eliminating these errors and Stalfort agreed in principle that the local REC’s had to do a better job in counseling mariners in their home ports. And, with that in mind, he also asserted that it was the Coast Guard’s goal to reduce turnaround time for documents to an average of 30 days or less, by the end of March.

MarEx also asked Stalfort to quantify, if he could, the average turnaround for what he characterized as “the perfect application” – or one that had no errors, omissions and no apparent health issues. Responding immediately, he claimed that these files were being turned around in 10 to 14 days, with the largest delay being contained in the time it took to mail the paper files back and forth. He added, “Eventually, we think that we can reduce this time down to 48 hours or less, with an e-application process. We are working on building the Merchant Mariner Security Electronic Application System to enable mariners to submit applications electronically, thereby eliminating the current paper-based system.” He added that he hoped to one day bring the process back to where it was in the past when mariners sometimes could turn their documents at the local REC’s around in less than a day. He cautioned, however, that the legal, medical, security and statutory requirements now far exceeded what was in place only ten years ago and that these factors had to be taken into consideration.

Stalfort candidly characterized his NMC plans as “lofty goals,” but remained convinced that the Coast Guard can and will get the job done. In the meantime, there can be no denying that American mariners are experiencing real pain as the process works through its teething period. Today’s mariner would probably be immediately happy with a turnaround time of thirty days or less. It remains to be seen if that intermediate goal, now looming large in windshield at the end of March, can be achieved. As with any important issue facing the domestic maritime industry, there is more than one opinion on how to get to the Promised Land, two sides to the story of how the process is coming along, and a decidedly uncertain eventual resolution to this short term crisis. -MarEx