‘Deep sadness’: Doctors, nurses recall intensity of treating victims from River Valley fire 

When casualties from River Valley began arriving, the first thing she did was to organise and activate a team of about five doctors and up to eight nurses, who were split between the Children’s Emergency and the ICU, where they saw to burn wounds.

She knew exactly what they had to do – “carefully and systematically assess” every patient.

Her team followed a careful process: removing temporary dressings, assessing and documenting each wound, before “scrubbing down” – where a layer of the patient’s dead skin is removed and the area cleaned up before it is dressed.

Doctors typically assess the percentage of total body surface area burns and the depth of burns, before coming up with a treatment plan. More serious wounds could require surgery such as skin grafting, where dead tissue is replaced with healthy skin from another part of the body.

PREPARING FOR THE UNKNOWN 

At SGH, the arrival of paediatric patients – uncommon at the adult-focused hospital – required rapid adaptation.

Nurse clinician Muqtasidatum Mustaffa said the situation was complicated by not knowing how many patients to expect.

“There was a lot of uncertainty. We just had to prepare our resources, prepare our manpower,” she said.