A renowned Welsh war surgeon has returned to Ukraine to share his skills and experience with the next generation of medics.
Dr David Nott is spending a week in the east of Ukraine treating patients injured in the Russian invasion, and helping to teach Ukrainian doctors in the specialist techniques of trauma and battlefield surgery.
Over the past 25 years Carmarthenshire's Dr Nott has worked under-fire in some of the most infamous and dangerous conflict zones in the world including Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Chad, Iraq, Libya, Haiti, Gaza and Syria. Now he and his team have returned to Ukraine for the second time since the brutal war in that country started.
Speaking to the BBC he said: "I know what it's like to be under fire. I know what it's like to be in an operating theatre which is being shelled. You're trying to do your best to try and save the life of the patient in front of you. But what we can do here is train people and I think we will have trained 70 surgeons in six days."
The surgeon spent his early years in rural Carmarthenshire after his mother, a trainee nurse at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, and his Indo-Burmese doctor dad sent him to live with his maternal grandparents, who he refers to as his mamgu and datcu. Though he has travelled the world since what he calls his "completely magical" Welsh boyhood, he has said his heart is in Trelech. Read more about Dr Nott's extraordinary life and career which has seen him become one of the most experience trauma and war surgeons in the world.
Dr Nott said one of the most rewarding parts of the trip to Ukraine was that fact that the medics he and his team have trained are already putting their new skills to good use. He told the BBC: "It's been amazing. I've just had a message on my phone from a doctor who's done his first ever thoracotomy to save a patient's life by making an incision into the heart. That's thanks to the training he had two days ago. He's now back on the front line in Donbas under severe conditions. And he sent me a photograph to say, 'look what I've done, David, I've made the incision, I've done exactly what you've been teaching us'."
In 2015 Dr Nott and his wife Elly set up the charitable David Nott Foundation which provides surgical training for doctors and nurses who work in war and disaster zones. In 2017 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Carmarthen.
The day after he returns to the UK from Ukraine, the Welsh surgeon will return to his day job as an NHS consultant.
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