David Malcolm Nott is a Welsh consultant surgeon who works mainly in London hospitals as a general and vascular surgeon, but also volunteers to work in disaster and war zones. Having recognised that training others could greatly increase his capacity to help, Nott established the David Nott Foundation, along with his wife Elly, to organise training in emergency surgery for others working in war and disaster zones. He has been honoured for this dangerous work and is now often styled the "Indiana Jones of surgery".
Education and family
Nott was born in Carmarthen in 1956 and lived with his grandparents at Trelech, near Carmarthen, until the age of four. He then lived in the Midlands and Rochdale from where he attended Hulme Grammar School. His father, Malcolm George Nott, was an orthopaedic and trauma surgeon, specialising in hip replacement, and was born in Burma and educated in Madras, India. Malcolm Nott was half-Indian and half-Burmese. Nott's mother, born Yvonne Jones, was a nurse from Wales. Malcolm Nott's father encouraged his son to follow him into a medical career., and also inspired his son's war work by taking him to see the 1984 filmThe Killing Fields. Nott was not successful at school initially but, after resitting his A-levels, he studied medicine at the Universities of St. Andrews and Manchester, graduating in 1981. As a child, often left on his own, Nott was fascinated with building model aircraft and later learned to fly, gaining both a private pilot licence and a commercial pilot licence. He became an air transport pilot and flew for Hamlin Jet in Luton, as a side job, for about ten years.
On a mission to Libya, Nott began to realise that a lot of the medical staff there were not trained for the kinds of injuries they were encountering. He began running a Definitive Surgical Trauma Skills workshop for his colleagues in the hospital. This experience, in part, led to Nott setting up the David Nott Foundation in 2015, along with his wife Elly, who led the charity as Chief Executive until 2019. The David Nott Foundation provides surgical training for doctors and nurses who work in war and disaster zones. The training courses focus on life saving surgical procedures that are crucial in austere environments, with doctors given the opportunity to practice on real bodies, supported by other resources, including videos and anatomical models. The courses are run with the Royal College of Surgeons for five days every six months and are fully funded by the foundation through a scholarship scheme for surgeons working in hostile conditions. These courses are also delivered on the front line, where doctors are unable to leave their posts, and have already been held in Yemen, Libya and Iraq, among others. The front line Hostile Environment Surgical Training courses last for four days. They focus on a wide range of skills, including treating gun shot wounds and carrying out vascular surgery, with the help of a full-body simulator. The simulator is a perfectly accurate model of the human body and can be used to demonstrate various procedures.
In 2015 Nott married Eleanor Jupp, and their daughter was born in the same year. Eleanor, known as "Elly", was formerly an analyst with the Institute of Strategic Studies. In 2014 he had lunch with the Queen. When he found it difficult to speak about his traumatic experiences, she put him at ease by inviting him to take twenty minutes to befriend her corgis. In 2016 Nott was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs: his music choices included "Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones' and "Fix You" by Coldplay, his favourite being "Good Golly, Miss Molly" by Little Richard. His book choice was Kallimni Arabi Mazboot, to help him learn Arabic. In 2016 Nott spoke of his Christian faith on BBC1's Victoria Derbyshire.
Publications
In February 2019, War Doctor was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week.
