David Nott Foundation - Sips & Sutures
- Hannah Vaughan Jones
- Nov 21
- 2 min read
Last night I braved the cold and headed into London for a David Nott Foundation - Sips & Sutures event. Essentially a chance to see the extraordinary training the Foundation offers medics in conflict zones while sipping on a glass of bubbly. Now, I count myself lucky because it's not my first encounter with this amazing Foundation. The CEO James Gough is a dear friend. We met in a gym in south London many years ago and have since bonded over being married to Welsh folk (Goffy taking it a step further and moving to Wales with his Welsh speaking wife and children). Eleanor Nott (co-founder of the Foundation) has also married into the Taffia as her husband David is a proud Welshman. Elly and I shared a platform in New York this September, and I was given the enormous privilege of interviewing some extraordinary surgeons for a Foundation fundraiser in south Wales a few months ago. Nor was it my first encounter with "Heston" the Foundation's prized fake cadaver -- which so accurately presents as the human body that you can almost see a shiver go down his spine as he's being poked, pulled and prodded.
The evening was a stark reminder of the desperate situation for those on the frontline of conflicts today - particularly in Ukraine as a DNF team (and Heston) returned from Kyiv in just the last few weeks. Ukraine has fallen out of the headlines recently, but the war with Russia rages on, and not it seems in Ukraine's favour. Faculty surgeons demonstrated skin grafts, how to find and fix a ruptured spleen, even a caesarean section!
My son was born via C-Section so it was fascinating to see how it should be done in a resource-constrained environment. I guess I've had the luxury of forgetting that difficult births still happen in the most inhospitable of environments.
The David Nott Foundation is a remarkable thing. It trains war doctors to have the knowledge and confidence to be able treat anything and anyone who shows up in an operating theatre - however makeshift that theatre might be. It's lifesaving training in the most intense and dangerous of circumstances.
The people of the Foundation are all lush (sorry, couldn't resist) and those they train consider them a humanitarian lifeline at a time when, let's face it, the world can seem a rather dark and polarised place. If you're a fan of Desert Island Discs, I can highly recommend listening to David Nott's castaway episode. It's my favourite and first alerted me to David and his extraordinary work. And if you are currently on the lookout for an organisation to support... the David Nott Foundation would be a wonderful recipient.