Last week, our Lower Sixth students had the privilege of attending a lecture from Old Georgian Dr Victoria Rose, now a leading Consultant Plastic Surgeon at St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospitals.

Dr Rose began her training in plastic surgery in 1998, working in a number of London plastic surgery units, also spending time in Dallas, Stockholm and Taiwan as a microsurgical fellow for 15 months. After completing her specialist training in 2007, Dr Rose was appointed as an NHS Consultant at a London teaching hospital before moving to Manchester in 2009. It was here that she led breast reconstruction in one of the largest breast cancer units in the country, the Nightingale Centre at Wythenshawe Hospital. In 2013, she returned to London to take on the role of Lead of Plastic Surgery Trauma Reconstruction at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.

During her talk with the Lower Sixth students, Dr Rose spoke of her experiences volunteering with a charity in Gaza and the impact of vital surgical care, training and equipment in a situation where there was a lack of all essential resources. She shared photos and videos, demonstrating how difficult it was for both doctors to give medical care, but also for patients to receive it.

Since joining the charity IDEALS (International Disaster & Emergency Aid with Long-term Support) in 2019, Dr Rose has frequently visited Gaza to teach local surgeons a combined orthopaedic and plastic surgery approach. In March 2024, she took her first trip back since the war had broken out and volunteered in the European Gaza Hospital. In the beginning, she found the team were mainly treating severe burns and shrapnel injuries, but that quickly changed to gunshot wounds. Local surgeons and staff didn’t have the equipment or training needed, so Dr Rose came back to the UK and packed up 25 suitcases worth of equipment to take back to Gaza in August 2024. Dr Rose and her fellow surgeons found themselves surviving purely on energy bars and packets of dried food they had taken with them, working extensive hours in difficult and dangerous conditions, often to the sound of gunfire.

Dr Rose has been out to Gaza three times since the war began and would like to go back, but acknowledges the stress for her family over the work she has been doing, so hopes to keep working with IDEALS to raise funds for future teams and she shares her story through video diaries on her Instagram and interviews on the news.

We are always very grateful when Old Georgians return to inspire our current students with all they’ve achieved since leaving the College and are very grateful to Dr Rose for her time.