The Pakistan earthquake: A British trainee's experience

The earthquake that struck Northern Pakistan and Kashmir on 8 October 2005 at 08:50 h local time measured 7.6 on the Richter scale and caused massive destruction. The current estimated death toll is 87,000, with an additional 150,000 casualties of whom 50% were children. This devastating earthquake displaced 3.5 million people and affected a land area greater than did the Tsunami of 2004. We present the experiences of a trauma team who travelled to Pakistan's earthquake-affected region from the UK and helped set up a combined orthopaedic and plastics trauma unit. Following the earthquake, a specific appeal by the Association of Pakistani Physicians and Surgeons, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), was taken up by, among others, three orthopaedic specialist registrars, one consultant anaesthetist and two theatre nurses who independently volunteered their services. This group arrived 2 weeks after the earthquake and formed a British Trauma Team based at the Children's Unit in Islamabad's largest government hospital, the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences. An opportunity arose through another NGO, Red Crescent International, to help set up a combined trauma unit with a team of visiting UK plastic surgeons in a private hospital, Al-Shifa, situated in Rawalpindi. The team treated a total of 150 patients during the 2-week stay. A breakdown of operations performed is shown in Fig. 1. The mean patient age was 10 years. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.