A Scottish surgeon raced to Malawi to treat the wounded after the country was battered by Cyclone Freddy.
Aid worker Andy Kent is part of the UK Emergency Medical Team (EMT) deployed to the impoverished African nation through the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office as part of the international response to the disaster. Devastating flooding caused by Cyclone Freddy has displaced an estimated 183,000 people across Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar – killing more than 500 people.
Former military medic Andy – now an orthopaedic surgeon based at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness – told of the challenges he’s faced treating casualties at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre in southern Malawi.
He said: “A lot of the orthopaedic injuries we are treating are people whose houses have fallen in on them due to the flooding. The injuries we are seeing are mainly lower limb long-bone fractures – complicated injuries where you have open fractures with bones sticking out.
“With the wounds and bone exposed, the risk of infection is significant, especially in a country where the risk of infection is already high. Sadly, a lot of people have been swept away and drowned before they’ve managed to get to higher ground.
"If you’ve broken an arm or leg and get washed away, you cannot swim and will drown. If you consider there are 500 confirmed dead and 500 still missing, a lot of the people we’ve been treating have lost loved ones and friends. It’s heartbreaking.”
Brave Andy was awarded an OBE in the King’s New Years Honours list for his humanitarian work volunteering with frontline aid charity UK-Med, who supply doctors and nurses to the UK Government’s EMT. Andy, who has previously supported crisis responses in Ukraine, Iraq and Beirut, hailed Malawian medics who make the best of their limited resources.
He said: “Malawi only has around seven full-time consultants or orthopaedic surgeons in the whole country serving 17million, whereas there are 16 orthopaedic surgeons at Raigmore alone. There are very well-trained surgeons here doing the best they can with limited resources.
It is very stressful operating in an environment where you don’t have the equipment you have back in the UK. Instead of using fancy, very expensive power drills that we use to put screws in, they use normal drills you could buy from B&Q, which they put inside a sterile bag.”
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