British medics who bring hope to disaster victims

IT was a Saturday morning and Pete Skelton was looking forward to spending the weekend with his fiancée, Arij. At least he was until his phone rang.

“I was planning to look at wedding venues in Yorkshire, but instead I was on a train back down to London,” he says.

The call came from the UK Emergency Medical Team which was being drafted in to help treat casualties in Nepal following April’s devastating earthquake. The disaster claimed nearly 9,000 lives and left many more injured.

On top of that almost 900,000 houses were damaged or destroyed, leaving tens of thousands of people homeless. Powerful aftershocks continued to be felt, over a period of days and weeks which caused even more destruction and created an atmosphere of dread.

Pete, who comes from Scarborough and now works in London, flew out the day after the initial earthquake as part of the UK government’s emergency response team. “It took two days to get to Kathmandu because the airport was partly out of action,” he says.

When he finally reached the city its inhabitants were in a state of shock. “Kathmandu itself wasn’t too badly damaged, although some of the older buildings had completely collapsed. But there was a sea of tents outside because people were understandably afraid of going back inside their houses.”

He was there when the second earthquake struck in May. “Everything started shaking and it got bigger and bigger and then suddenly it stopped, so you have this moment of relief and then you go and make sure your colleagues are okay and find out who needs our help.”

The city’s main hospitals were stretched beyond capacity as large numbers of injured people were brought in from surrounding regions. At the Nepal Medical College the situation was exacerbated by the fact that it had to close its main building due to a partially collapsed tower, which meant the most critically injured patients had to be moved to an underground car park.

Pete, an NHS-trained physiotherapist and rehabilitation specialist, was one of more than 30 medics sent to Nepal as part of a team that also included paramedics, GPs, emergency physicians, anaesthetists and orthopaedic surgeons.

The trauma medics, sent out by Department for International Development (DFID), joined the UK International Search and Rescue team on the ground to deal with those injured.

Pete says that while Kathmandu survived the worst of the earthquake, it was an altogether different picture in the outlying regions. “I was really struck by the scale of the devastation in rural areas. You only had to travel 45 minutes from the capital and you came across small towns and villages that had been completely destroyed. Many of those injured had lost their families, their homes and their livelihoods.”

Most of his work, though, centred on Kathmandu. “Our job was to support the local medical teams as best we could, because there was a huge influx of patients being brought in to the hospitals.”

His team worked in Nepal’s only spinal injury centre, which had 30 beds but over 200 patients who needed urgent specialist treatment. “We brought in specialist nurses and rehabilitation experts from the UK and they trained more staff on the ground and helped increase capacity in terms of beds as well as skill levels.

“We were able to bring in the technical expertise of the NHS and support people who were desperately in need of help.”

A lot is made about the amount of money that is spent on overseas aid, it’s believed that Britain’s support to Nepal stands at around £70m, with some people arguing this money could be better spent elsewhere.

But Pete says the benefits are far reaching. “Our staff get trained in leadership skills and we’re able to help train medical staff overseas, so it works both ways.”

The British medics spent eight weeks in the country. “We recovered a lady in her early twenties with a spinal cord injury from a remote village.

“She had two young children and without specialist surgery she could very easily have died.

“We were able to safely evacuate her to the Spinal Injury Centre, where she received high quality care and rehabilitation and she is now doing really well.”

The work they do is about more than just providing emergency treatment. “There’s a very strong rehabilitation component to what we do. It’s all very well doing some amazing life-saving surgery, or saving a person’s limb. But if there’s not proper aftercare and you don’t provide the rehab then that amazing work can count for nothing, it’s important that you join the dots.”

Pete works for the charity Handicap International and joined the UK’s emergency medical team two years ago.

He has become accustomed to putting his skills to the test in extreme situations and as well as working in Nepal he has travelled to disaster zones across the planet.

He’s been to Haiti and Iraq and was part of the UK government’s response to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013, where he worked in a field hospital in Tacloban, one of the worst-hit areas, as well as war-torn Gaza.

Haiti, in particular, was an eye-opening experience. “The country’s infra-structure had more or less been completely destroyed, whereas Nepal was able to cope pretty well. In Haiti there was a barely functioning healthcare system to begin with and the pure numbers involved – there was around 300,000 people with significant injuries - was really challenging.”

Gaza, too, was difficult, but for a different reason. “One of the biggest difficulties is not the fact you’re working in a disaster zone it’s when you’re working in an insecure environment. When I was in Gaza you had the added uncertainty surrounding your own personal safety.”

Pete has seen the kind of harrowing sights unimaginable to most of us, but says he doesn’t allow himself to get caught up in the emotion of a situation. “It’s similar to working in other jobs – if you get involved emotionally then you’re not able to do your job properly.”

He joined the UK International Emergency Medical Register (UKIEMR) because he wanted to use his skills to help others. “We don’t just show up, we only go out when we’re asked to help fill an important gap. So you feel like you’re really making a difference.”

It’s also a tough job and one that comes with great responsibility. “We have to make sure that wherever possible someone who’s been injured gets the care they need to be able to go back home and can support their family, or return to school, because if we fail to do that then we aren’t just failing that person we’re failing their family, too.”