China crisis
Original link: www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk
19 June 2008
By Katie Baldwin
IT was mid-operation that the building started shaking. As consultant trauma surgeon Toby Branfoot and his colleagues worked on a patient on the 10th floor of the Central Hospital of Mianyang, the reality of working in a disaster zone quite literally hit home.
The team of UK surgeons had only been in China for one day when the strong aftershock happened.
It came in the wake of the biggest earthquake to hit China for 30 years.
On May 12, the quake measuring about 7.8 on the Richter scale shook the Sichuan province.
The death toll was huge – 87,000 people killed or missing, including thousands of schoolchildren.
When news of the earthquake broke, West Yorkshire doctors wanted to help, including Waseem Saeed, consultant plastic surgeon at Leeds General Infirmary, and Amjid Mohammed, consultant in emergency medicine at Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax.
Both had previously travelled to Pakistan in the wake of the 2005 earthquake but an approach to the Foreign Office was rebuffed.
Instead they contacted Prof Tony Redmond, an expert in international emergency medicine from Manchester University.
Eventually the Chinese Government very unusually did ask for help and Prof Redmond was asked to quickly put together a team of medics to go out to the disaster zone.
With Mr Saeed's experience in Pakistan and the fact that colleague Toby Branfoot, who also works at LGI, had worked in Sarajevo, they were obvious choices.
"Prof Redmond was called on the Wednesday afternoon and on Thursday morning I got a phone call from Waseem asking if I could go," Mr Branfoot said,
"I said I could go at 4pm on Thursday and had to leave at 4am the following day."
Thanks to colleagues who arranged to cover their work, the pair were able to leave in less than 24 hours.
Mr Branfoot even took a set of equipment from LGI as medical equipment firm Smith and Nephew provided the hospital with a loan kit to use while he was away.
They flew first to Shanghai – carrying four crates of medical equipment – and then to Chengdu, nearer to the worst affected region.
Finally they made the journey to Mianyang, about 90km from the epicentre, by bus.
"All the pavements were lined by shanties and tents. Everyone was sleeping outdoors," Mr Branfoot said.
"People had lost their homes or were too scared to sleep in them.
"We found the same thing at the hospital – there was a huge car-park area lined with emergency tents. There were patients in intensive care beds on ventilators in the tents."
Meeting the local doctors at the Central Hospital of Mianyang was the first task of the seven-strong UK team. They were keen to work with their Chinese counterparts rather than risking alienating them.
"There was a surgical team and people were extremely welcoming, there was a real 'thankyou for coming' atmosphere," Mr Branfoot said.
"We did an impromptu ward round and looked at patients in the tents. We realised there were a whole lot of people with all sorts of injuries who needed treating."
Many patients had open fractures, where the bone goes through the skin, as they had been injured jumping from buildings or being hit by debris.
So the next day the UK surgeons started work to operate on as many as they could.
Working in three operating theatres, one nurse who could translate ran between the theatres to help with communication.
Cautious
Mr Branfoot said the Chinese medics were cautious at first but after the first few procedures realised the team knew what they were doing – and afterwards bent over backwards to help.
They had a successful day, treating a number of patients with Mr Branfoot and a colleague doing orthopaedic surgery while Mr Saeed worked on skin grafts.
"It was going very well until the end of the day when everything started moving," Mr Branfoot said.
A massive aftershock had hit the area and the team was forced to evacuate the theatre – which was 11 storeys up.
Mr Branfoot had to quickly stitch up his patient.
"The patient was taken from a ward, to the operating theatre and then woke up in a tent outside," he said.
Following the aftershock, that building was too abandoned, so the next day the team had to operate in a tent.
Government officials were beginning to fear that the area might flood and were worried about the UK team being in the area.
But when they found a four-year-old who was in danger of losing his arm, they were desperate to help.
"He had broken his arm and had no circulation to his hand," Mr Branfoot said.
"There was a danger this kid was going to lose his arm and there were some fairly high-level discussions.
"We managed to operate and hopefully that was a limb saved."
However it became clear officials were evacuating the whole city and the UK team were taken back to Chengdu, where they started work at No 2 People's Hospital of Chengdu.
They treated more patients there before their scheduled return to the UK.
Despite the initial resistance, the Chinese Government were so pleased with the team that their Minister of Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi made a special visit to Chengdu to meet and thank them.
Patients too were incredibly thankful.
"They all wanted to shake our hands and were so grateful that something had been done," Mr Branfoot said.
"It's very humbling. I'm sure the most important thing we did was just being there, going round the wards and saying 'we will fix this'."
"There were hundreds of people we would've liked to have done something for but we could not," he added.
"Anything we could do was a drop in the ocean but the fact that we were there was enormously good for morale.
"It's something really special to be given the chance to be involved in."
