David Nott in conversation with Sarah Montague
On the evening of the 30th April, David was joined in conversation with the BBC’s Sarah Montague at the Saatchi Gallery to discuss his new book, War Doctor. He was sharing stories of his work around the world in war zones and why he and Elly set up the Foundation to share his knowledge and expertise with local doctors working on the ground. Sarah asked him how many lives he thinks he's saved through his own work overseas in war zones and also through our training programme "Possibly in the hundreds of thousands," David replied.
Among the guests was actor and former doctor (of another variety) Peter Capaldi. He noted that the evening was "a humbling and inspiring experience, meeting both David and Elly."
We are delighted to report that, through the generosity of all those who attended the event, enough money was raised to provide equipment to train more than forty surgeons as well as award ten fully-funded scholarships to surgeons currently operating in war zones and disaster areas.
David Nott on 'Start the Week'
On 11th March 2019, David appeared as a featured guest on the BBC Radio 4 programme, 'Start the Week,' discussing his work in conflict zones
He tells Kirsty Wark how a combination of bravery, compassion and the thrill of danger inspired him to risk his life helping others.
Entitled 'King and Country,' the episode focusses on self-sacrifice, public duty and volunteers in the Middle East with David Nott, Joana Cook, Azad Cudi and Claire Foster-Gilbert.
To listen, follow this link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000356t
War Doctor
Have you read War Doctor yet? This is David's gripping account of life as a trauma surgeon in some of the world's most dangerous war zones. The book was released on the 21st February 2019 and we are proud to report that it debuted at Number 1 on the Sunday Times Bestseller List. Here is the latest news from the publisher, Picador:
- 27,000 hardbacks have been sold via the publisher so far
- 16,000 hardbacks have been sold through the tills in the UK
- It's been reprinted six times already!
Literally a Life Saver
Nott is a remarkable consultant surgeon who regularly leaves his day job at three London NHS hospitals to provide emergency surgical treatment in war zones. It bgan when he was moved by the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, and he has since treated victims of conflict in places such as Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The Mail on Sunday: My secret mission to save Aleppo’s babies of the blitz
David Nott writes for The Mail on Sunday
Of all the wounded children of Aleppo who passed before me, the memory of one has lodged in my mind like no other. Maram. I spent the week before Christmas in a field hospital in Syria operating on many tiny souls see-sawing between life and death, their bodies held together with metal pins and scaffold-like fixators.
But in Maram, a five-month-old orphan and beautiful despite her injuries, I saw my own child and, perhaps because I missed her so desperately, I felt intensely overwhelmed.
I have made numerous trips to Syria to treat the casualties of this war, but none was as sorrowful as the week I spent with Aleppo’s children. Bone-weary and drained emotionally, I returned to London on Christmas Eve and couldn’t wait to hold my 17-month-old daughter and see my wife and family. Christmas was a joy.
Yet Maram was never far from my mind’s eye: a haunting, residual memory that I could not have shaken even if I had wished; I find myself waking in the early hours worrying about her. I first saw Maram on December 20, a few days after she was evacuated from Aleppo in an ambulance. Her legs and left arm had been shattered in a bomb attack that killed her parents and injured her brother and sister.
Pieces of ordnance shell were embedded in her infected wounds but, because the Aleppo doctors had run out of dressings, disinfectant and saline, they had no choice but to operate on her dirty body tissue. As I looked down at Maram on the treatment table she was crying, not because she was tired and hungry, even though she was both, but because she was in great pain.
There are no paediatricians in Aleppo, or at the hospital where I was working; nobody qualified to make the very difficult decisions about how much analgesics and fluids to dispense. So in spite of all her suffering, Maram was simply on a small dose of paracetamol. It was heartbreaking. I checked her charts. In the UK, these would have been filled in with scrupulous attention to detail, but in Syria, with doctors battling to save the lives of so many, charts were overlooked. I couldn’t even tell what medication she had already received.
Maram wriggled uncomfortably. I tried to think logically about how to help her and what I’d need to do when I operated on her the following day. But precise thought was difficult as I felt myself experiencing the same sort of emotions that any father would have towards a wounded child.
I operated on December 21, carefully debriding Maram’s wounds and removing the decaying tissue inside her. The whole hospital stank of the bacteria that had caused her infections, and those in other patients. I worked delicately around the open compound fracture Maram had suffered in her left leg.
Correctly in my opinion, the surgeon who had operated on her in Aleppo had applied an external fixator, but this was so big and heavy that Maram couldn’t move her leg when she was awake. It was so sad to see. She also had a pin in her femur and another in her tibia, and she had a really big gap of leg bone missing from the explosion.
Read more here.
Elly & David Nott featured in Foreign Policy’s Global Thinkers 2016 list
Since the Syrian civil war erupted, the Assad regime has killed almost 700 medical personnel—and thousands more have fled. In Syria, “health care is seen as a weapon,” Welsh surgeon David Nott told the Independent. “You take out one doctor, you take out 10,000 people he or she can no longer care for.” Over the past four years, Nott has provided emergency care in Syrian clinics and has trained the remaining health workers in triage techniques and basic surgical skills. When he’s back home in London, he provides trainees with real-time advice about cases through text messaging. In February, Nott and his wife, Elly, launched a foundation dedicated to preparing doctors for war zones. About 30 Syrians attended its first training session in southern Turkey.
Read the full article here.
The Observer: In Aleppo’s destroyed hospitals the dead lie with the living
David writes for The Observer
I don’t think that in all my years of doing this I’ve ever seen such dreadful pictures of injuries, of people lying on the floor of an emergency room, the dead mixed with the living.
One colleague, who I speak to all the time, was in despair, sending me all these photographs, and saying: “David, you have to do something to help us.” But what can I do?
The message out of eastern Aleppo is that there are no hospitals functioning at all. They have all been repeatedly attacked in the past few days. Some were able to evacuate, but one was totally and utterly destroyed by rockets and bombs. I heard that two doctors were killed and 16 other staff injured and I am afraid that one of the dead may be a brilliant surgeon, who would be a particularly serious loss.
There is another hospital that we haven’t even had a message from. So, I suspect they are out of action, but we know nothing about the staff or the conditions there.
The Aleppo hospitals have been re-opened so many times, underground or at new locations, but between the bombing and the siege I don’t know if it will be possible to resurrect them this time. There is so much equipment that you need in order to operate and there is no sterilisation and no monitoring machines for anaesthetics. Even if the hospitals saved some machines they can’t run them because the generators have been destroyed or are out of fuel.
The taking out of every hospital and medical facility that gives hope and help to civilians is not a coincidence. The medics have such fantastic morale that you would not imagine them giving up, but I have an awful suspicion that this is the endgame.
Read the full article here.
Philanthropy Age: ‘You carry on because you’re saving somebody else’s life’
British surgeon David Nott has spent two decades operating on thousands of people in war zones, making life and death decisions under fire. Now he hopes to pass his hard-earned skills on to a small army of frontline volunteers
There’s a simple reason why I keep going back: I feel sorry for those who are caught up in conflict. Everyone needs access to healthcare, and I try to be the person to provide it. I first volunteered in the besieged city of Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1993 after seeing TV coverage of the conflict. What happened to me there changed my life. I’ve worked in conflict and catastrophe zones ever since: from Liberia and Darfur, to Haiti, Syria and Yemen.
In places wracked by war or natural disaster, there are few surgical provisions. There are limited blood supplies, few drugs and no diagnostic aids to speak of, so you rely on your medical skill. Yet, in war, most of the senior surgeons will have fled and it is the junior medics who are left behind. They may know basic surgical techniques, but they are faced with the most difficult wounds imaginable, from gunshots, snipers, IEDs and mines.
I take part in up to three missions a year with organisations such as Syria Relief, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). I go for three weeks at most if it is a really hot war zone; six weeks if the frontline is further away. If there are no casualties from the night before, my day starts around 7am, with a security briefing at 7.30am. I take an hour to visit patients and from 9am there are either new patients to see in the clinic or, if there are casualties in the emergency room, I begin operating. I can be doing that all day and sometimes all night. At my longest stretch, I operated for 22 hours. You forget the time, although you’re absolutely worn out. You carry on because you’re saving somebody else’s life – and then somebody else and somebody else. You sleep where and when you can.
In quieter periods, I teach. In Syria, for example, there are lots of junior surgeons who are not particularly well trained. They accompany me in the operating room and we do the surgery together. I show them first, and then they pick up the knife, scissors and forceps. Speed and accuracy are very important. I teach techniques to limit blood loss, and quick procedures. You get very engrossed in surgery – even though you are in a war zone, your mind is utterly focused on the job at hand.
Read the full article here.
David Nott receives Special Recognition at Pride of Britain Awards 2016
Every year for the past 23 years, David has taken several months’ unpaid leave from his NHS job in London to work as a volunteer for aid agencies including Médecins Sans Frontières, the Red Cross and Syria Relief.
The world’s most experienced conflict surgeon has operated with makeshift instruments, by torchlight and in constant fear for his own life.
He refused to stop operating when IS fanatics burst into his theatre in Syria and even when ordered to leave a hospital in the Gaza Strip which was due to be targeted by an air strike.
David, 59, recalls: “Everyone was leaving. But I knew I couldn’t possibly leave this little girl alone. I said to the Red Cross anaesthetist with me, ‘Do you want to go?’ He said, ‘No, I’ll stay with you’. So we stayed together, both believing that all three of us would die.
“But I carried on with the operation and as the minutes ticked by, I tried not to panic.
“I was expecting the worst, but I kept on operating.
“We were supposed to be blown up, and I was thinking, ‘If it happens, I’ve done a lot with my life really’.
“If our time was up, I just wanted to be there to hold the little girl’s hand.”
He has carried out lifesaving operations on victims of conflict and catastrophe in countries ranging from Bosnia and Afghanistan to Liberia, Haiti, the Central African Republic, Gaza and Nepal.
In Aleppo in Syria, he worked in a makeshift hospital saving lives as barrel bombs rained down.
The carnage affected him more than any other conflict, and it took him months to readjust after returning home from the visits.
“It’s such a tragedy I can’t find the words,” David says.
His humanitarian work began in 1993. He flew to Bosnia after seeing the conflict on the news.
“I’d seen a man on TV crying as he searched for his daughter among the rubble after a bomb blast in Sarajevo,” David says. “I made a snap decision. I was overwhelmed by the necessity to help.”
The married father of one was awarded the OBE in 2012 for his work in war zones, which he fits in around surgical roles at three London hospitals.
He is also a qualified pilot and has served with the Royal Auxiliary Air Force as a volunteer surgeon, holding the rank of wing commander.
David has also raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for charitable causes and has set up the David Nott Foundation, a charity training surgeons to carry on his work in war zones and natural disaster areas. “It’s the legacy I am trying to leave,” he says. “To be a war surgeon is a fine art, knowing the right thing to do for a patient with what’s available. If you do too much, that patient will die as surely as if you do too little.”
David’s dedication to saving lives is simply extraordinary. We are all horrified by the humanitarian disaster in Syria, but he has risked his own life to make a difference there. His reserves of compassion and courage are boundless.PRIDE OF BRITAIN JUDGES
Read more here.