Helping kids in Gaza is something I'll always be proud of

City children's nurse on the horror and humanity she saw in war zone

- HELENA VESTY

“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” - a rare touching moment in the midst of horror.

Scenes of immense violence and suffering in the Middle East have rocked the world. But instead of turning off the TV, one Manchester medic ran towards the crisis, offering her help as the number of injured people pile up while the Israel-Gaza conflict rages on.

Now, she’s revealing the reality of treating those, many of whom are children, left with life-changing war wounds. Manchester children’s nurse Kathleen Shields was deployed to Gaza earlier this year with Manchesterbased frontline medical charity UKMed.

“Once we got the emergency department and wards set up, we started receiving patients transferred to us from other hospitals which were overrun. I am a children’s nurse, but you do whatever you can to help and initially a lot of our admitted patients were adults,” explains Kathleen.

“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.”

UK-Med volunteer Kathleen, who works in paediatrics in Manchester, spent three weeks in Gaza after going into the war zone on March 20. While there, she treated patients in the most crushing circumstances, and also helped set up the UK government funded emergency field hospital in Al Mawasi.