A plastic surgeon who has treated more than 20 people injured in last Saturday's bomb attack in Omagh said yesterday that many of them would need medical treatment for the rest of their lives.
Mr Derek Gordon, a consultant plastic surgeon, said many of the casualties faced a difficult future. He said he was still treating patients who had been injured in explosions 20 years ago.
"By the nature of the speciality of plastic surgery, we would tend to deal with the patients who have had the more severe injuries, between burns and soft tissue injuries. Many of those patients have had other life-threatening injuries as well, and some of them are still in the peripheral hospitals and are just too sick to be moved," he said.
"Firstly we want to save the patient's life and to make sure that nothing we do in planning the reconstruction is going to compromise the patient's recovery. What we want to do is to get the patients safe, to get them healed and to take care of all their emotional and family problems that are bound to arise.
"I think the phase of reconstruction won't start to take place for several weeks to come. Once that does start, the reconstruction can take many years, particularly with children. As children grow, they develop new problems with scarring, their expectations may change in that a child of four or five may have very different expectations to a teenager," he said. Mr Gordon said that although there was a limit to what plastic surgeons could do, the patients would get the best possible treatment.
"There is a limit to what we can do and we have to accept that many of these people will have functional and cosmetic disabilities." Many staff treating the casualties had also been affected emotionally, he added.