Burn center

Gardaí are raising the alarm as Dublin Fire Brigade prepares for its busiest night of the year tomorrow.

I'm joined now by Greg O'Dwyer, Dublin Fire Brigade Chief and Dr Oran Shelley, Clinical Professor and Director of the Burn Centre at St James' Hospital.

You're both very welcome this morning.

Good morning.

And then young children approach them thinking it's a dud and they explode in their face.

It's incredibly frightening.

I want to bring in Dr. Oren Shelley, clinical professor and director of Burns Centre at St. James's Hospital.

We've heard from Greg there.

The only thing that I felt good at was taken away from me.

So like it was one of those where it was like I found it very difficult to see the benefits when like going into hospital was the thing that stopped me and prevented me from going back when I knew that weren't the case because I knew that like being injured and I would not be able to operate properly with like my mate's life depending on it could I operate quick enough in that moment in time such early on in my sort of injury and recovery like I wouldn't have been able to but like because of like time and experience now living with my scars and being able to sort of like manage my own recovery and physio sessions do I understand now that going back to the hospital it's such an important you know process to extend my quality of life that I really don't mind going back there it's the work that they do at the burns unit in Queen Elizabeth is phenomenal and like I've had that experience every single time I've been there and I've been going there for the past 20 years.

Yeah, that's amazing.

And it's good that you kind of got your head around that.

I sort of opened my eyes past my own issues.

While I was still going there for my own treatment, I was going into the hospital and because I had such a great relationship with the nurses and the doctors on the parent union.

They'd sometimes ask me to go and just speak to people on the burns unit.

And some of the people I've spoken to was like kids as well.

It really does.

This is the burn unit.

It is the environment where the catastrophic physical destruction of the human body meets the absolute, you know, rawest vulnerabilities of the human mind.

It is arguably the most intense environment in modern medicine.

I mean, we often operate with this artificial dichotomy between physical trauma and psychological aftermath.

But in the burn unit, they are inextricably linked.

We can't separate them.

You really can't.

So we, we realized that just going over there and spending 10 days with our doctor teams was one very positive thing that was happening, but we realized there might a other, be other ways to help, and some of those were to bring Ukrainian doctors back here, uh, to the United States for more extended training.

And so our first group of, uh, physicians is now training in burn surgery at Parkland's Burn Center.

How large is this initial group that's come to Parkland?

We have, uh, six, uh, healthcare workers, four burn surgeons, and one epidemiologist, and one nurse, uh, who takes care of burns in, uh, in Ukraine.