Surgeon helps child quake victims

Patients are treated in the reception area of the crowded hospital

A Kent consultant has flown out to Pakistan to help provide emergency medical help for quake victims.

Matin Sheriff, from Medway Maritime Hospital, Gillingham, is working at a children's hospital in Islamabad.

He found the city's main hospital so full that patients were being treated in the reception area.

"It is absolutely shocking," he said. "In England you have an abstract version of what you have heard and seen. Here, reality dawns on you."

Families have been broken up, mothers lost, fathers gone - a whole generation wiped out Matin Sheriff, consultant surgeon

Mr Sheriff said he had helped to treat one girl who had waited for two days to be rescued from Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

He said she had been "very close to the epicentre", had lost her family to the quake, and had undergone a number of amputations to her left side.

The surgeon said: "Here, there are patients whose lives have been really affected and destroyed.

"Families have been broken up, mothers lost, fathers gone - a whole generation wiped out.

One child lost her family and had a number of amputations

"They are in a makeshift camp here, with an uncertain future, and no idea where they are going to be once they leave here."

Outside the hospital, lists are pinned up showing the names of children being treated, in the hope that their parents might have survived and come to claim them, BBC South East Today reporter Mark Norman said in a report from Islamabad.

About 800,000 survivors need help and shelter as winter looms, according to the UN.

Pakistan estimates the quake killed more than 53,000 people in the region of Kashmir it administers and some 1,400 people died in Indian-controlled Kashmir, officials have said.

Mark Norman's full report can be seen on BBC South East Today on Monday 24 October at 6.30pm.