Medics' Indian surgery marathon

By David Fenton
BBC South Health Correspondent

Surgeon Tom Dehn was "humbled" by his Indian experience

A surgical team from a Berkshire town has just returned from a remote valley in the Himalayas - where they carried out more than 40 operations in just 10 days.

Conditions were so primitive that the operating table had to be propped up with bricks and the scrub room was a metal bowl and a bar of soap.

At one point the power failed and they had to sterilise equipment using a candle flame in a small village in Northern India.

But the team from Reading - a surgeon, anaesthetist and four nurses - carried out a range of operations to help people with cleft palate, hernias and gall bladder problems.

Around here [in the UK] if you go to grab a piece of equipment, it is there. But in India it's not there Theatre nurse, Sally Willink

Surgeon Tom Dehn said it had "opened his eyes" to the possibilities of practising medicine under "extreme conditions" and with little equipment.

"It has affected what I feel about medicine in general and how we treat patients.

"I feel there is a huge world out there that we in the West could give an enormous amount to, but we're just not trained for it.

"I have come back feeling very humbled."

The team, from the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Redlands Road, Reading, travelled in their own time and with out-of-date NHS stock to a hospital which had been set up to help local tribes people.

In temperatures well below zero, they often had to wear ski hats and coats in the operating theatre just to keep warm.

Theatre nurse, Sally Willink, said they had to get used to improvising - even the most basic equipment was simply not available.

Many of the machines used to help pump blood and drugs into the patient had to be operated by a foot pump.

"Around here [in the UK] if you go to grab a piece of equipment... it is there," she said.

"But in India it's not there, so you have to be very organised in what you are doing and work with what you have."

The group has now returned to the well-equipped operating theatres at the Royal Berkshire Hospital - but they are planning to return to India again next year.

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A surgical team perform 40 operations in 10 days in a remote Indian village