A FIFE nurse has lifted the lid on her life-saving work in war-torn Gaza, describing treating patients with amputations and burns from the ongoing war there, as well as seeing children left “skeletal” from malnutrition.
Kathleen Shields was deployed to Palestine earlier this year with Manchester-based frontline medical charity UK-Med.
The charity, funded by the Foreign Office, runs two hospitals in Al Mawasi and Deir El Balah which have treated more than 100,000 patients since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
Ms Shields, 31, said she hopes to return for another Gaza deployment but her family often worry because of the “horrific” images on television.
The children's nurse said: “When I first arrived, I was drafted in to support Palestinian medics operating the Wadi Gaza clinic, near the north of Gaza, which was really eye-opening because at that time the north had been the hardest hit with bombing.
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“The clinic was situated at the top of a hill and it was impossible not to notice the devastation for miles around. You knew you were in a war zone and just thought, ‘Wow, this is real’.
“I’d never experienced anything like missiles flying overhead before.
“The first time I was scared asking ‘Are we going to be OK?’ and the more experienced staff reassured me, ‘Don’t worry, if we’re hearing it like this, it means it’s not going to hit us’.”
She added: “I felt in awe of the Palestinian staff and felt incredibly lucky to be working with people who were so committed to helping and caring for others no matter what difficulties they had to overcome.”
Ms Shields, who is from Kirkcaldy but now works in paediatrics in Manchester, spent three weeks in the Gaza Strip, with much of her time spent setting up the field hospital in Al Mawasi.
She said: “People understandably worry because everyone’s seen the horrific news footage on the telly.
“When it all started to dominate the news, my partner Alfonso had joked with me, ‘Please don’t go there’. I think anyone in the same position would understandably be worried."
She went on: “Once we got the emergency department and wards set up, we started receiving patients transferred to us from other hospitals which were over-run.
“I am a children’s nurse, but you do whatever you can to help and initially a lot of our admitted patients were adults.
“It was eye-opening to suddenly be seeing people with war injuries.
“One of the first patients we received had had both of his legs amputated above his knee.
“There were burns victims, particularly children having accidents in tents where cooking is so much harder.
“One of the saddest things you came across was lots of babies and children suffering malnutrition and literally starving almost to death. Just tiny skeletal little things.”
The nurse added: “I remember one case quite vividly, a child with a burn injury to his arm who needed the dressing changed.
“We blew up some medical gloves like balloons and drew faces on them and his parents were so appreciative of the fact that for a short while their son was laughing and being a child again.”
Her work in the war zone is funded by the UK Government's Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office. Foreign Secretary David Lammy announced a further £5.5 million this year to UK-Med to fund their life-saving work in Gaza.
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