‘My partner begged me not to, and I thought it was selfish, but I had to do it'

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

“I remember one case quite vividly – a child with a burn injury to his arm who needed the dressing changed. We blew up some medical gloves like balloons and drew faces on them and his parents were so appreciative of the fact that for a short while their son was laughing and being a child again” – a rare touching moment in the midst of horror.

Scenes of immense violence and suffering in the Middle East have rocked the world. But instead of turning off the TV, one Manchester medic ran towards the crisis, offering her help as the number of injured people pile up while the Israel-Gaza conflict rages on.

Now, she’s revealing the reality of treating those, many of whom are children, left with life-changing war wounds. Manchester children’s nurse Kathleen Shields was deployed to Gaza earlier this year with Manchester-based frontline medical charity UK-Med. READ MORE: Mapped: Suspected Mpox strain cases in Greater Manchester and England as global emergency declared over another variant “Once we got the emergency department and wards set up, we started receiving patients transferred to us from other hospitals which were over-run.

I am a children’s nurse, but you do whatever you can to help and initially a lot of our admitted patients were adults,” explains Kathleen. “It was eye-opening to suddenly be seeing people with war injuries.