Chris is setting sail with the Mercy Ships charity (From This is The West Country)

Chris is setting sail with the Mercy Ships charity

7:00pm Wednesday 17th February 2010

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AN ANAESTHETIST at Yeovil District Hospital is heading for the high seas to work as a volunteer for the Mercy Ships charity.

Chris Elsworth will be casting off for two weeks from February 28 and joining a crew numbering several hundred - from the captain to the volunteer surgeons to the ship’s Ghurkha guards.

Together their mission is to provide free surgical help to patients from communities around Lome, the capital of Togo in West Africa.

Mercy Ships is a long-established Christian-based charity, whose converted cargo vessel is fully equipped with operating theatres, recovery suite and post-operative wards. It is manned entirely by professional volunteers from all over the world and visits a different place each year, with recent locations including Benin, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The patients come from local communities and are assessed and selected by the surgical teams. All operations are provided free.

Chris heard about the charity from various colleagues who have volunteered for Mercy Ships in the past.

“Mostly we will be carrying out plastic surgery and similar operations on children for conditions like cleft palate and facial tumours,” he said.

“There are also patients who need orthopaedic operations to deal with conditions like badly united fractures.

“A large amount of operations are performed for women with fistulas which lead to social ostracism as well as causing physical suffering.

“I am sure it will be a very rewarding experience and it is great that YDH has been willing to back me and give me special leave to work for this really worthwhile cause.”

Like all of the other volunteers Chris is funding the trip himself. Each person pays their airfare and a contribution to their living expenses, depending on how much they can afford.

The work is going to be unique in many ways.

“We will be dealing with patients whose conditions are far more advanced than we would normally see in our everyday work,” he said.

“There will be many small children requiring head and neck surgery which we do not do here, so that will be interesting.

“In particular, there is a type of facial growth known as ‘noma’ which is very common in West Africa. It can become so advanced that it is life-threatening: dealing with this can be very challenging as special anaesthetic techniques may be required for coping with potential airway complications.

“I think that whenever you go and do something which is out of your usual environment, you inevitably come back with a broader outlook. This makes your professional and wider life richer and inevitably puts things into some kind of fresher perspective.

“I am really looking forward to this experience and to being able to help with this worthwhile cause.”

If anyone wants to contribute to Mercy Ships they can either contact Chris at the Anaesthetic Department, Yeovil District Hospital, Higher Kingston, Yeovil, BA21 4AT and he will give donations directly to the ship, they can email him via comms@ydh.nhs.uk or they can donate via the website www.mercyships.org.uk which can be accessed via the link on this page of our website.

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