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Monthly Archives: August 2013

‘Indiana Jones of surgery’ leads UK medics in war-zone training

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Uncategorized

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disaster and conflict zones, emergency response teams, humanitarian crisis, medical assistance, medical interventions, natural disasters, surgeons, training, war

‘Indiana Jones of surgery’ leads UK medics in war-zone training

More than 1,000 NHS physicians are set to receive specialist training to provide emergency medical interventions in disaster and conflict zones, under the tutelage of one of Britain’s most renowned surgeons.

The first group of 30 clinicians completed an intensive training course earlier this month which equipped them with skills needed for medical procedures with minimal equipment and support. It was funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) and led by the London vascular surgeon David Nott – dubbed the “Indiana Jones of surgery”.

Mr Nott, who has piloted the course alongside the Royal College of Surgeons, has 20 years’ experience working in regions scarred by war and natural disasters, and made headlines five years ago when he amputated a boy’s shoulder in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), taking instructions from a colleague in the UK via text message.

A register of medics willing to be deployed to humanitarian crisis zones – the UK International Emergency Trauma Register – was set up by DFID last year and now contains more than 1,000 names. Surgeons who have completed the required training may be called up to join emergency response teams in the event of a natural disaster or a major humanitarian crisis where the UK government has decided to intervene directly.

Increasing numbers of British doctors travel to Syria with NGOs to assist at hospitals overwhelmed by victims of the civil war. Although there are no plans yet for the UK government to provide direct medical assistance in Syria, DFID financially supports NGOs providing back-up at hospitals and field clinics. Overall, the UK has committed £348m to aid the Syrian people.

Mr Nott, who has been working as an emergency surgeon for the NGOs Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for 20 years, said that the training is sorely needed.

“It’s the first course run like this in the whole world,” he said. “We go through things by scenarios. If there was a chest problem and you need to sort it out but you’re working in a tent, you don’t have much blood stock and you don’t have any intensive care unit, how do you save that person? How do you save the person that is bleeding out from their arm? How do you save someone with abdominal gunshot wounds? There are ways. If you’ve had the training, even if you’ve seen it done only once or twice, then it’s much easier.”

The one-week intensive course had participants working with cadavers in simulated disaster zones. Mr Nott, who will soon travel to Syria with an NGO to teach similar techniques to local doctors in rebel-held areas, said that many doctors in the UK “have the ambition” to work in extreme circumstances.

One of his own students at Imperial College London, Dr Isa Abdur Rahman, 26, was killed working in a makeshift hospital in Syria in May. A number of young doctors, often with family ties to Syria, have risked their lives working for medical charities in the country since the conflict began two and a half years ago.

“You can’t stop the desire of people to go,” Mr Nott said. “If you want to go and do things, it’s a great thing, but you do take huge risks. We’re opening this course not only to consultants but to juniors as well, so at least if they’re not experienced enough at the present time, they are the generation that’s going to follow.”

Mr Nott first worked for MSF in Bosnia in 1993. Since then, he has travelled to dozens of countries including Sierra Leone, Sudan, the DRC and Chad, and has served with the Defence Medical Services in Basra, Iraq, at the height of violence in the city in 2007, as well as at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan.

While working 24-hour shifts with MSF in the DRC in 2008, he had to perform a life-saving amputation on a boy whose left arm had been ripped off, becoming badly infected. Although he had never performed the operation before, he took instructions via text from a colleague who had at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital, and saved the boy’s life.

The following year, while working in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, he saved the life of a baby found in the rubble of a hospital in Port-au-Prince, arranging an emergency flight to Britain for specialist surgery on her skull. The child, Landina Seignon, made global headlines when she was reunited with her mother, who rescuers had feared was dead.

Mr Nott still operates at three London hospitals, working in general surgery at Chelsea and Westminster, vascular and trauma at St Mary’s and in cancer surgery at the Royal Marsden. He takes six weeks’ unpaid leave each year to carry out his humanitarian work.

“I felt that my first mission, to Bosnia, was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” he said. “To be able to help people that really needed it, who wouldn’t have help without you, was something fantastic. That always stayed with me. It was a burning flame that I couldn’t put out. Life is enriched hugely by doing something like this. We found that all it needs is somebody to get this course up and running and you suddenly see people coming out of the woodwork that also have the ambition to do this.”

In memory of dedication

Dr Isa Abdur Rahman, who trained under Mr Nott, was killed working in Syria in May. The 26-year-old graduate from Imperial College London was working for the UK charity Hand in Hand for Syria when the makeshift hospital in Idlib province where he was based was shelled. His friends set up an online fundraising page in his honour, which has raised nearly £72,000. They plan to use the funds to build a field hospital in memory of Dr Rahman in Homs, Syria.

More than 1,000 NHS physicians are set to receive specialist training to provide emergency medical interventions in disaster and conflict zones, under the tutelage of one of Britain’s most renowned surgeons.

The first group of 30 clinicians completed an intensive training course earlier this month which equipped them with skills needed for medical procedures with minimal equipment and support. It was funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) and led by the London vascular surgeon David Nott – dubbed the “Indiana Jones of surgery”.

Mr Nott, who has piloted the course alongside the Royal College of Surgeons, has 20 years’ experience working in regions scarred by war and natural disasters, and made headlines five years ago when he amputated a boy’s shoulder in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), taking instructions from a colleague in the UK via text message.

A register of medics willing to be deployed to humanitarian crisis zones – the UK International Emergency Trauma Register – was set up by DFID last year and now contains more than 1,000 names. Surgeons who have completed the required training may be called up to join emergency response teams in the event of a natural disaster or a major humanitarian crisis where the UK government has decided to intervene directly.

Increasing numbers of British doctors travel to Syria with NGOs to assist at hospitals overwhelmed by victims of the civil war. Although there are no plans yet for the UK government to provide direct medical assistance in Syria, DFID financially supports NGOs providing back-up at hospitals and field clinics. Overall, the UK has committed £348m to aid the Syrian people.

Mr Nott, who has been working as an emergency surgeon for the NGOs Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for 20 years, said that the training is sorely needed.

“It’s the first course run like this in the whole world,” he said. “We go through things by scenarios. If there was a chest problem and you need to sort it out but you’re working in a tent, you don’t have much blood stock and you don’t have any intensive care unit, how do you save that person? How do you save the person that is bleeding out from their arm? How do you save someone with abdominal gunshot wounds? There are ways. If you’ve had the training, even if you’ve seen it done only once or twice, then it’s much easier.”

The one-week intensive course had participants working with cadavers in simulated disaster zones. Mr Nott, who will soon travel to Syria with an NGO to teach similar techniques to local doctors in rebel-held areas, said that many doctors in the UK “have the ambition” to work in extreme circumstances.

One of his own students at Imperial College London, Dr Isa Abdur Rahman, 26, was killed working in a makeshift hospital in Syria in May. A number of young doctors, often with family ties to Syria, have risked their lives working for medical charities in the country since the conflict began two and a half years ago.

“You can’t stop the desire of people to go,” Mr Nott said. “If you want to go and do things, it’s a great thing, but you do take huge risks. We’re opening this course not only to consultants but to juniors as well, so at least if they’re not experienced enough at the present time, they are the generation that’s going to follow.”

Mr Nott first worked for MSF in Bosnia in 1993. Since then, he has travelled to dozens of countries including Sierra Leone, Sudan, the DRC and Chad, and has served with the Defence Medical Services in Basra, Iraq, at the height of violence in the city in 2007, as well as at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan.

While working 24-hour shifts with MSF in the DRC in 2008, he had to perform a life-saving amputation on a boy whose left arm had been ripped off, becoming badly infected. Although he had never performed the operation before, he took instructions via text from a colleague who had at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital, and saved the boy’s life.

The following year, while working in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, he saved the life of a baby found in the rubble of a hospital in Port-au-Prince, arranging an emergency flight to Britain for specialist surgery on her skull. The child, Landina Seignon, made global headlines when she was reunited with her mother, who rescuers had feared was dead.

Mr Nott still operates at three London hospitals, working in general surgery at Chelsea and Westminster, vascular and trauma at St Mary’s and in cancer surgery at the Royal Marsden. He takes six weeks’ unpaid leave each year to carry out his humanitarian work.

“I felt that my first mission, to Bosnia, was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” he said. “To be able to help people that really needed it, who wouldn’t have help without you, was something fantastic. That always stayed with me. It was a burning flame that I couldn’t put out. Life is enriched hugely by doing something like this. We found that all it needs is somebody to get this course up and running and you suddenly see people coming out of the woodwork that also have the ambition to do this.”

In memory of dedication

Dr Isa Abdur Rahman, who trained under Mr Nott, was killed working in Syria in May. The 26-year-old graduate from Imperial College London was working for the UK charity Hand in Hand for Syria when the makeshift hospital in Idlib province where he was based was shelled. His friends set up an online fundraising page in his honour, which has raised nearly £72,000. They plan to use the funds to build a field hospital in memory of Dr Rahman in Homs, Syria.

The biggest problem for parents of a child with special needs? Other people

16 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Uncategorized

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The biggest problem for parents of a child with special needs? Other people

Jane McCready is used to her 10-year-old son being gawped at “as if he were a circus freak” but she will never be reconciled to it. “Children are one thing, they don’t know any better. But these are adults. They look at Johnny and their mouths fall open and they just stare. And I think: didn’t anyone ever tell them how rude that is?”

Johnny has severe autism and learning disabilities. “He looks like any other child, but he behaves oddly – for example, he might sit there banging two toys together – and he sometimes makes strange noises.” Especially when he was younger, he might have a massive meltdown – at the supermarket checkout, for instance. “I’d feel 300 pairs of eyes on us – all watching us, all judging us for being disruptive and difficult,” says Jane. Perhaps the worst day was when, at the swimming pool, another mother pulled her child away from Johnny “as though he had something catching”.

This, she says, is what you are up against when you have a child with special needs: other people tend not to be very kind. Which is particularly awful “because you’ve already got so much on your plate as it is. The odds seem stacked against you, and if people just gave you a bit of space and support, it would go a long way. But the opposite is more often the case: you’re struggling to start with, then people knock you down further. They make assumptions about you, they find you wanting, they treat your child as though he or she is dangerous or badly behaved. It’s soul destroying. It’s so bad, so hard to deal with, that I have friends with special needs kids who don’t even take them out any more.”

Jane, 49, who lives in south London, turned to Mumsnet to vent her feelings; and she was not the only parent in her situation to do so. Mumsnet members who didn’t have children with special needs were shocked at their stories, and so too were the women who run Mumsnet. “We realised how incredibly hurtful some of the behaviour they were describing was, and realised we should do something,” says co-founder Justine Roberts. “It’s about letting judgmental feelings go and stopping all the tutting from the sidelines.

“The truth is that it’s incredibly tough to have a child with a special need such as ADHD or autism. In many cases, it’s a 24/7 job and to have to suffer the prejudices of others on top of that is just too much. There’s a strong feeling on Mumsnet that how we look after our most vulnerable says a lot about our society and you don’t get much more vulnerable than children with special needs. So we need to up our act a bit, as a society.”

To that end, Mumsnet this weekend launches This is My Child, a campaign aimed at getting us all to think a bit more about the realities of life for families with children who have special needs and to check our behaviour accordingly.

“A little bit of help goes a long way,” says Jane. “One time Johnny was melting down and this woman approached me. I thought she was going to complain – you get people who say things like, all he needs is a good slap. When she said ‘What can I do to help, dear?’ I could have hugged her. It must have taken some bravery for her to do it, but it made such a difference to me. I felt someone was on my side rather than the usual wall of hostility.”

Claire Champkin, 40, who lives in Twickenham, Surrey, knows just how Jane feels. She says the biggest difficulty about life with six-year-old Toby is the negative attitudes of others. Her son has moderate-to-severe autism, and is largely non-verbal, but dealing with the realities of his condition pale next to dealing with the unkindness she encounters from strangers who decide for themselves that he is simply a badly behaved child with an inadequate mother. “One day we were in the park, and a father who was sitting on a bench pushed his glasses down to the end of his nose and sat there staring at Toby in evident disapproval. I felt like heading across to shout and swear at him, but you can’t do that.

“What do people think gives them the right to behave that way? And the irony is, they think they’re making a judgment on my child’s bad behaviour.”

Amanda Marlow, 43, who lives in Milton Keynes, says she has survived by growing a skin so thick she doubts anyone’s disapproval could penetrate it. “Sometimes I think if I marched through the shopping centre with ‘fuck off’ written on my forehead, I couldn’t be more obvious about it,” she says.

She has four children, twins Elizabeth and James, 13, Oliver, seven, and Alex, six. Elizabeth has Treacher Collins syndrome (which causes craniofacial abnormalities); James has Asperger’s syndrome and Alex has severe autism.

“What I’d like people to understand,” she says, “is that these are my children. This is my life. It’s not a bed of roses, but we try to make the best of every day. What would be nice is if people were kind and considerate once in a while, and gave us a bit of space. We’re dealing with issues that most people haven’t got a clue about, and it’s intrusive when you get someone coming up to you and saying, he needs a clip round the ear when one of them has a tantrum.”

If Amanda, Claire and Jane could ask the rest of us to do just one thing, it would be to stop staring. “It’s fine to do a double take, but once you’ve taken in that our children have a disability, get on with what you’re doing. It doesn’t give you the right to gawp,” says Claire.

Beyond staring, what angers Amanda is when strangers ask about Elizabeth. “They say, what’s wrong with her? And I say, nothing’s wrong with her. She’s fine.”

Claire agrees: it’s not a tragedy, she says, that her child has a disability. “We don’t need pity; we’re a very happy family and we just want to get on with our lives. I hate people calling me ‘special’ or thinking I somehow have extra qualities that enable me to deal with all this. The truth is that when it happened to me, I thought I couldn’t cope.

“But a very wise person said to me: ‘You’ll cope because you have to.’ And that’s what anyone would do. Calling us ‘special’ or alluding to our great qualities makes us different, sets us apart, and we don’t want that at all.”

What is also irksome to many parents is when other people take it on themselves to reassure them that all will be well. “I get that all the time,” says Ellie Grant, from Wiltshire, whose three-year-old daughter Roberta has the chromosomal disorder Kabuki syndrome. “Roberta had hip dysplasia and, when she was in plaster, people would say: ‘She’ll be walking soon enough and you’ll wish she wasn’t.’ That’s so hurtful – the idea that when she does one day walk, I’ll wish she couldn’t.”

The other thing they often say is how gorgeous and cute Roberta is, as if that is somehow incompatible with a disability. The people you value most are those who just treat you as they would any other family. I love it when people meet us and they try to engage with Roberta, just as they would any other child; that’s so good. What I don’t need is sympathy; I’m hugely proud of my little girl and all she’s achieved. She and her baby brother are the centre of my world and the idea that people feel sorry for me is just so misplaced.”

There are around 770,000 disabled children in the UK and, says Justine Roberts, their families deserve better. “A lot of it is about raising awareness about the reality of their situation, and busting some of the many myths. There’s a myth that some disorders, such as autism and ADHD, are a fashionable excuse for bad behaviour and bad parenting. Wrong: these conditions are real and disabling and it is terrible that the parents and families of those with them are stigmatised.

“Another myth is that children with disabilities are given the help they need. In fact, Mumsnetters tell us time and again about how little help there is, how much they have to fight for everything they’re given and how long it takes even to get their child’s condition diagnosed.”

Another myth, says Justine, is that language around disability doesn’t matter. “You get a lot of people who use words like ‘retard’ and ‘mong’ and for some reason that’s tolerated, while language that’s racist or sexist or homophobic definitely wouldn’t be. We’ve learned how hurtful it is to families where there are disabilities, and now we clamp down on it on the site – and we’d like others to do the same. It really is important. It really does make a difference.”

What you can do

• You can’t always tell when someone has a disability. Respond kindly, not judgmentally.

• Don’t make assumptions about a child’s potential based on a label. People with disabilities have a range of capabilities, just like anyone else.

• If people seem to be struggling, ask: “How can I help?” or “What do you need?”

• Saying “at least it’s not cancer” is not helpful.

• If there is a child with a disability in your child’s class, invite him or her over to a playdate, or include him or her on the birthday party list. Too many parents of children with special needs kids say their kids miss out on peer activities.

• And one last time: don’t stare. Really. Just don’t.

Source: mumsnet.com/campaigns/this-is-my-child

More information at mumsnet.com/campaigns/this-is-my-child

Video

Eleanor Longden: The voices in my head

09 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Uncategorized

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hearing voices, schizophrenia

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