Features: 'Why I went into medicine'
26 January 2009
A doctor speaks to GMCtoday about his work with Medecins Sans Frontieres
In early December 2008, consultant vascular surgeon, David Nott, became headline news after text messaging a colleague for advice to help him perform a forequarter amputation on a 16-year-old boy in the Congo who otherwise would have died. Having never seen or performed the operation before David contacted his colleague and friend in London, Professor Meirion Thomas, who gave him step-by-step advice the day before the operation. GMCtoday spoke to David about his work with Médecins Sans Frontières.
David felt compelled to contact MSF after watching a programme during Christmas 1993 about war-torn Bosnia and a man searching for his daughter in the rubble of Sarajevo under siege. When the girl was finally found, the lack of medical help meant she could not be saved.
David explained: ‘I just needed to go and help. It was Christmas 1993 and I called MSF who sent me out to Sarajevo in the middle of the war’. David offered his services as a surgeon and worked in the state hospital in the centre of the city. ‘The ethos of MSF is to save lives and that is the reason I went into medicine in the first place. Helping a person in distress with dignity is what MSF and other agencies do and I am very proud to be associated with that’.
Since 1994 David has spent one month a year volunteering for MSF, taking unpaid leave from the hospital where he works in London. He has been to many conflict zones in the world including Bosnia, Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chad, Ivory Coast, Southern Sudan and Darfur. David is one of 450 doctors from the UK and Ireland who volunteer, but is currently the only UK surgeon.
So why volunteer? David says he wants to offer his skills to patients abroad, giving them the best chance of survival. He’s also learnt skills outside his own speciality: ‘Using one’s experience as a surgeon allows one to save and change lives with basic obstetrics and gynaecology, from caesarean sections to vesicovaginal fistulae and I’m not a bad orthopaedic surgeon either. Sometimes you are the only surgeon for thousands of people’.
At home David says his work is ‘completely different but equally as challenging’. He works at the Royal Marsden, performing cancer operations that require vascular reconstruction, at Charing Cross performing pure vascular surgery and also performs general and laparoscopic surgery at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
To find out more about volunteering with MSF please visit www.msf.org.uk