Patching up Dragons is all in a day’s work for Lindsay White.

The maxillofacial consultant and head and neck skin cancer lead at the Royal Gwent Hospital combines her surgical work on people’s faces and jaws with her role of team doctor for the Newport-based rugby club.

Lindsay, who was the ‘surgeon of the year’ at the South Wales Argus Health and Care Awards 2020, has been looking after the Dragons for just over four years.

“I used to play rugby myself for just over 15 years and when I came to Wales I started off with Newport Rugby,” she explains. “Someone from there asked me if I would do some stitching for them on an ad hoc basis, and I went on to do the full training to be able to serve as a team medic.

“I absolutely love it: it’s great fun and a lot of it doesn’t feel like work as I get to see a really high standard of rugby, which I love, and get to know all the people involved.

“When you’re pitch side you’re as close to the action as you can possibly be without playing rugby yourself.”

Lindsay is one of three medics close to the pitch during home games, and over the years she’s travelled to Galway, Glasgow, Italy and Romania for away matches.

Stitching and suturing skills used during operations on jaws and faces come in very handy when it comes to looking after rugby teams, says Lindsay, who often has to deal with cut faces and broken noses.

“Pretty much in every game there will be somebody with a laceration,” she says.

“Sometimes I will suture the skin together but sometimes stitches are needed. It’s a bit of a routine for players to come and see the physio and me after a match.

“It’s often the case that I’ll get a call after training sessions, with players coming to see me for treatment between surgeries at whatever hospital I’m working at, or, if I’ve got the day off, I come and see them at the training ground. It works very well.”

Lindsay’s work as a maxillofacial consultant can involve everything from treating people suffering from oral cancer or misaligned jaws to looking after individuals with facial injuries from vehicle collisions. Skin cancers also account for a large section of her work.

Lindsay was nominated in the ‘surgeon of the year’ category at last year’s health and care awards by a grateful patient who had been suffering from an aggressive tumour.

The patient praised her ‘warmth, compassion and professionalism’.

Being nominated as surgeon of the year and actually winning the award was a wonderful experience, says Lindsay, who has degrees in medicine and dentistry, has been a maxillofacial consultant for five years and a surgeon since 1998.

“It was so nice because it was a patient who nominated me,” she says. “It’s nice to be appreciated like that.”

South Wales Argus: logo

WE are delighted to announce that Western Power Distribution is the headline sponsor in the South Wales Argus Health & Care Awards.

The energy landscape is changing rapidly.

Already, the traditional network design of transferring electricity from large central power stations to homes and businesses using transmission and distribution networks is evolving into a flexible system that can cope with a range of new demands, and over the last year, Western Power Distribution has been building the foundations to meet them.

The company has published a fully-costed strategy, involving stakeholder engagement, and worked on equipment analysis, trials and flexibility services in close liaison with others from across the industry.

It is also helping community groups that want to embrace energy efficiency, low carbon technologies or set up electric vehicle charging points for streets without offroad parking. Case studies and advice can be found at: westernpower.co.uk/Community-Energy

What this all means is that Western Power is establishing a smarter, more cost-effective network capable of providing even greater flexibility for customers who depend upon it.

For years its innovation engineers have been working on projects that aim to keep the lights on in a low carbon world in the most cost-effective way for customers.

These include: Electric Nation, which at its launch was the largest Electric Vehicle smart charging trial in the world, and Superfast Electricity, where threephase wiring is being installed into new-builds, which is more cost-effective than the single service cable to homes used in the industry since the 1940s.

Western Power is also helping customers check how green their energy mix currently is by using the Carbon Tracer app, through which customers can see how much of their electricity is generated from renewables by simply typing in their postcode.

For more, see: westernpower.co.uk/DSO