Bristol doctor: The scale of the Haiti earthquake disaster was overwhelming

A Bristol doctor has returned to work in city centre hospitals after helping to treat people injured in the Haiti earthquake.

Anaesthetist Rachael Craven spent almost a month of her leave in Port-au-Prince with the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

The consultant, who works mainly at Bristol Royal Infirmary and the eye hospital, helped set up an inflatable hospital in the Haitan city and was part of the team treating the injured.

Dr Craven was involved in setting up equipment for the operating theatre, recovery room, intensive care and emergency room, as well as a basic lab.

She has been working with MSF for five years and uses four to five weeks of her annual leave to support their projects throughout the world.

Dr Craven, of Redland, spent eight months working for the charity between working at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust (UHBristol) as locum and taking up her permanent role with the hospitals.

Since 2005 she has used her leave to help out in Indonesia following the tsunami, Jordan, war-wounded near the Iran Iraq border, Nigeria and the Congo.

The 39-year-old had been involved in MSF's work in Haiti back in 2006 at a trauma centre set up by the charity.

She said: "We were dealing with all the usual trauma you would get in a big city as well as gun shot and machete wounds.

"Over the last four years things have got a lot better in Haiti."

Before heading back to the country, Dr Craven spent a few days in France being briefed for the trip and the team then drove into Haiti via the Dominican Republic.

She said: "It was not until we reached the outskirts of Port-au-Prince that we started to see earthquake damage.

"To begin with we would just see buildings that looked fairly normal but then realised as we got closer that they had been two or three-stories and had collapsed to two or one.

"There were a lot of buildings that had completely collapsed down on themselves.

"As we got into the centre the devastation was much more complete. There were some buildings that looked fairly normal until you turned the corner."

Dr Craven said people were sleeping out in the streets and in makeshift tents and there were signs up saying that they needed food and medicine.

She said: "I would have been working in the trauma centre when I went back but it collapsed in the earthquake.

"When I first arrived they were working at the hospital but had set up an operating theatre in a shipping container in a courtyard. Obviously that was very far from ideal.

"It was fenced off from the road and patients were lying on pallets and flattened cardboard boxes for beds because the beds were in the collapsed hospital.

"We got the inflatable hospital together as quickly as possible."

Dr Craven said that patients had mainly suffered crush injuries and open fractures, but initially there was a need to focus on life and limb-saving and ensuring the risk of infection was minimised. Major reconstructive surgery had to wait until the operating theatre had been properly set up.

She said there was also an issue with sending patients home and those who would usually have been discharged had to remain in holding wards or areas because they could not recuperate properly in tents and on the streets where there was poor sanitisation.

Dr Craven was already due to take two weeks off in February for a holiday, with the intention of heading to Nicaragua, when the earthquake hit.

She said: "The big challenges were the sheer numbers and the fact that unlike in a conflict situation where lots of casualties are spread over time, there was the sheer number of patients all with quite similar injuries.

"There were estimates that 300,000 people were injured and they all needed help at the same time, which is just completely overwhelming."

Dr Craven finds returning to the NHS "like paradise" after her experiences in war-torn or disaster areas and finds it makes her appreciate the comfort she lives in.

She said: "I have always wanted to do overseas work and when I ended up as an anaesthetic it meant I could do work with surgical procedures and there are a limited number of charities that do that kind of thing.

"I was interested in MSF because they really do go to places where often there is no other option."

For more information about Medecins Sans Frontieres or to donate, visit www.msf.org.uk.