Ukraine will need medical support for years, surgeon says

A British surgeon who is training Ukrainian colleagues via Zoom has said the war-torn country will need medical support from other nations for years.

Prof David Nott has performed surgery in numerous war zones and helped medics in Syria via the internet.

He has been running a course for Ukrainian doctors on situations they will face after the Russian invasion.

But he said "lots of specialist knowledge" will be needed for patients still there or taken abroad.

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He said: "There'll be a huge amount of requirement to treat and take those patients that have been badly injured either abroad, if we can do that and have lines of of extraction or UN lines... or there'll be teams of surgeons hopefully going in.

"And, again, it all involves international humanitarian law and and the Geneva Conventions."

He said doctors were human beings, and senior surgeons might have been forced to leave hospitals to protect their own families, leaving young doctors in their place.

Prof Nott, who was brought up in Trelech, Carmarthenshire, works as a consultant surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London and has spent 30 years working as a humanitarian surgeon around the world.

Prof David Nott says Ukraine will need medical support from other nations for years to come

He set up a foundation to pass on the skills and knowledge he picked up from treating the kinds of injuries seen rarely by doctors outside of a war zone, such as blast injuries and the effects of fragmentation wounds.

"So, this is what the surgeons in Ukraine, unfortunately, will will be dealing with and, of course, like any of us, they've never seen that before ever."

Prof Nott said he condensed a five-day course into 12 hours for about 530 doctors in Ukraine who were able to join via Zoom.

He said he knew from experience the extremely difficult circumstances they were working under.

"You really know need to know about the patient, you need to know how much resources [sic] you've got, you need to know how much blood you've got, you need to know what you can do, because the things you can do in war surgery are completely different.

"There's there's lots of emotions going around there's lots of stress around, the hospitals may be bombed any minute.

"You've got to get through lots of cases and you need to make those very difficult decisions on whether or not it is the right thing to operate on somebody, or whether or not it's the right thing just to let them go."

He added: "The big problem is, at the moment, none of their elective work will be done anymore and none of the patients that have cancers or any other sort of illnesses like that will be done any more.

"What will be done is all the trauma cases, and so their hospitals are going to be full."

The NHS consultant surgeon has worked voluntarily in Syria, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, among other places.

In 2016, he has said he was left "seriously traumatised" after returning from Syria but was helped when he met the Queen and she let him pet her corgis.

He said it was "impossible" to put yourself in the position of those medics on the front line in Ukraine because of the immense stress.

"I know what they're suffering from, I know the effects of what it's like for their psychology, I know how they're feeling, I know what they are going through.

"And to not to be able to be worried about treating the patients that come in, must be also another huge stress for them as well, so that's what I was trying to do, was to try and alleviate that stress."