City nurses brave battlefield

IN THEIR everyday job they might expect to deal with drunks and drug addicts more than bullet wounds and bombs.

That all changed for two city nurses however, when they swapped the Capital for a three-month stint at a field hospital in Afghanistan.

Helen Singh and Venetia Price were part of the 205 (Scottish) Field Hospital (Volunteers) who for the past three months have been helping to run the hospital at Camp Bastion, in Helmand Province.

The facility has around 50 beds and nine trauma wards, and deals with civilian and military casualties.

In one of the most dangerous areas of the country and the centre for most of the recent operations by US and UK forces, the hospital is constantly busy.

Senior Nursing Officer Mrs Singh, 45, from Duddingston is a critical care nurse at the Western General and has been a nurse since 1987.

She was one of the staff leaders at the hospital in Camp Bastion, as well as helping deal with casualties, and admitted: "I saw more trauma in the last three months than I would ever see working in Edinburgh".

"It is a very difficult theatre of operations, and quite lot of the injuries are from explosive devices where we would be looking at perhaps a double amputation," she said.

"It was hard, and you had to make sure the staff were well looked after. We were briefed in advance of some operations, as those would be the busy times.

"We spent 18 months training, and I was in Iraq previously, but obviously you can never be fully prepared for what you will see."

The hospital was at its busiest following major operations, such as Operation Moshtarak in February – the biggest offensive in Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taleban in 2001.

Ms Price, 32, of Leith, who has worked at the ERI for the last three years, had previously been deployed to Iraq, working out of tents in the Shaibah base near Basra. But while that prepared her for the experience, she admitted it was a very different situation in Afghanistan.

"We were far busier than we had been in Iraq," she said. "We worked in shifts, so you would do 12 hours and after that it was pretty much a case of resting before the next shift.

"There were a lot of bullet wounds to troops and civilians, which isn't something you have to deal with generally in the UK – although I have actually dealt with a couple of gunshot wounds in Edinburgh.

"Then there are the soldiers whose vehicles have been targeted by explosive devices, who come in with severe back problems or concussions."

The pair returned to the UK at the end of April, and were today due to meet public health minister Shona Robison during a visit to the ERI for the launch the Scottish arm of the Military and Civilian Health Partnership Awards 2010.

The awards celebrate and honour the partnerships between the UK's armed forces, the NHS and voluntary and private sector.

Ms Price added: "My lasting memory of Afghanistan was the people we worked with and the incredible courage and bravery of the soldiers we met."