Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00You are a consultant in plastic and reconstructive surgery and I gather you worked, you know, non-stop more or less the time you were in Gaza.
00:11Just talk us through what your day-to-day reality was when you were there.
00:17Well, we would start operating at about eight o'clock in the morning and we would have a list downstairs in one of the big NGO run buildings.
00:28We would run a plastic surgery list and next to it an orthopaedic list.
00:35And the idea was that we would cross cover any orthopaedic injuries that had skin loss or skin issues.
00:43We would do those as well and then we would have our own list.
00:46We'd have about 10 patients on the plastics list, 10 patients on the orthopaedic list.
00:50And then we would run a sedation room of dressing changes and that would have another five patients on it.
00:58At the same time, we'd have to be available to the main theatre suite, which was upstairs and it was a block of five theatres.
01:07And that's where general surgery, neurosurgery, vascular surgery would undertake their work.
01:12And if they came across any patients that had large areas of soft tissue loss or burns or needed amputations, then they would call us and we would go up and help them with those cases as well.
01:24So it's a really quite a busy day.
01:27We're operating on sort of, you know, up to 25 patients a day.
01:32And we would normally try and finish all the planned work by about 10 o'clock at night.
01:38And then we would go back to the accommodation area, which was within the hospital.
01:44We would normally eat, we would sort of discuss the plans for the next day.
01:50I would put in the following day's operating list and then we would submit all our numbers of our activity for the day to the WHO and then go to bed.
02:01We would be called in the night for any mass casualty events that required urgent plastic surgery.
02:08So that would normally be limb threatening injuries that tended to happen more towards the end of our trip because we started to see more mass casualties then as NASA got further into the active fighting zone.