Kirkcaldy nurse treated war-injured patients while volunteering in Gaza with UK-Med

Children’s nurse Kathleen Shields went to Gaza earlier this year with frontline medical charity UK-Med.

The charity is now running two field hospitals in the country, funded by the Foreign Office, which have treated more than 100,000 patients in Gaza since the start of the war.

Kathleen hopes to return to Gaza, but her loved-ones back home worry having seen the “horrific news footage” on television.

The 31-year-old said: “When I first arrived, I was drafted in to supporting Palestinian medics operating the Wadi Gaza clinic, near the north of Gaza, which was really eye-opening because at that time the north had been the hardest hit with bombing.

“The clinic was situated at the top of a hill and it was impossible not to notice the devastation for miles around. You knew you were in a war zone and just thought, ‘Wow, this is real’.

“I’d never experienced anything like missiles flying overhead before. The first time I was scared asking ‘Are we going to be okay?’ and the more experienced staff reassured me, ‘Don’t worry, if we’re hearing it like this, it means it’s not going to hit us’.

“You were constantly aware of explosions going off. It’s strange because within a couple of days of being there, hearing bombs going off and windows shaking became completely normal, to a certain extent. It was only when you heard a new warfare noise you hadn’t heard before that you’d get startled.

“I felt in awe of the Palestinian staff and felt incredibly lucky to be working with people who were so committed to helping and caring for others no matter what difficulties they had to overcome.”

Kathleen, who now works in paediatrics in Manchester, spent three weeks in Gaza earlier this year and helped set up the UK Government funded emergency field hospital in Al Mawasi.

Last month, Foreign Secretary David Lammy announced a further £5.5 million this year to UK-Med to fund their work in Gaza.

A big chunk of Kathleen’s deployment was dedicated to getting the Al Mawasi medical facility up and running to receive patients suffering appalling injuries.

She said: “Once we got the emergency department and wards set up, we started receiving patients transferred to us from other hospitals which were over-run.

“I am a children’s nurse, but you do whatever you can to help and initially a lot of our admitted patients were adults.

“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.”

Kathleen added: “People often ask me, ‘How on earth can you work with children in places like that? It must be heartbreaking to see innocent children affected by war’.

“Although they don’t understand why these awful things are happening to them, they still smile and laugh and play. They still want to be children.

“When you have a small child in front of you and you can distract them and play with them and make them smile and laugh, it helps everyone hopefully forget about what’s going on for a few minutes.

“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.”