Red Cross trains damage-control surgeons for North-East conflict

The International Committee of the Red Cross is staging a workshop to teach surgical skills to hundreds of doctors treating casualties of armed violence in the North-East of Nigeria.

Doctors from ICRC and local partner hospitals are adapting lessons from ICRC’s surgery of war-wounded in situations of limited resources, triage of mass casualties, wound ballistics and health care in danger.

The course, the fifth edition, is also training health providers and first responders in classification and basic management of weapon wounds, antibiotic, weapon injury and trauma as well as damage control surgery.

“During conflict, most of the time, we are not talking about massive equipment, machinery and technology,” said Dr Padshah Hashemi, health coordinator for ICRC, Nigeria. “You are talking about providing basic lifesaving surgical care with the minimum of instrument and facility.”

Injuries related to conflicts come in massive numbers that overwhelm the capacity of hospitals to respond, and doctors have said personnel and ambulances in which health providers can tend the wounded are crucial in first response.

Contingency plans between ICRC and hospitals allow hospitals “activate their human resource to respond in a better way to big number of casualty” in emergency involving mass casualties, said Hashemi.

But ICRC senior surgeon, Dr Gunter Wimhoefer, who has worked as a Red Cross surgeon for more than 30 years, said increased conflicts around Nigeria in the past few years have increased “need to reach as many as possible surgeons even in small district hospitals.”