A nurse has been telling of her experiences of helping with the relief effort in earthquake-hit Haiti.

Debbie Lau, of Queensbury, is a senior sister at Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust who works at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary A&E.

However, last month she travelled to the disaster zone, along with a team sent out by Merlin, a UK aid agency. The team set up a hospital on a tennis court, seeing 50 patients a day and sleeping in tents in the grounds of a hotel.

She said: “We had to be really flexible and do a bit of everything. I worked as a scrub nurse as there was a lot of reconstructive surgery and saving limbs.

“The language barrier made it difficult to empathise with people, which is something I often rely on when treating patients at home.”

Debbie, 34, said the main problem encountered was a lack of resources such as oxygen and basic medicines.

“We did not have an ambulance and it would take a car hours to go a few miles because the streets were so busy,” she said.

“There were hospitals, but some were damaged and a lot of staff who had worked in them had been killed.”

As well as dealing with injuries Debbie also had to deal with the many other issues.

She said: “There was one father who came to us who wanted to give his little boy away. He had lost all of his family and could not look after him – we had to work with Unicef on this.”

After two weeks Debbie returned home, but said the whole experience was extremely rewarding for her.

She said: “It was a really unique experience, really rewarding and I learned a lot. The Trust and my own department have been really supportive and without that I would not have been able to go.’’