Local surgeon finds his calling in the danger zone

There is always an element of risk working in a conflict zone. But Dr Au Yiu-kai trusts the International Committee of the Red Cross and Medicins Sans Frontieres, with whom he has volunteered for more than a decade, to give him an accurate reading of the danger.

Even so, when he was due to go to Gaza this summer - at a time when shelling from the Israeli side and rockets from Hamas on the Palestinian side were at their most intense - his family was concerned.

"My wife was worried," said Dr Au, 55, a consultant surgeon at the Kwong Wah Hospital in Yau Ma Tei. But she was used to having him travel to disaster zones to help the victims there, he said.

Au worked as a field surgeon in Sichuan after the magnitude-8 earthquake that devastated the province in 2008. In 2010, he worked in Haiti after a magnitude-7 quake killed up to 30,000 people in the country. Last year, he went to the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, and conflict zones in Liberia and Yemen. He has previously treated casualties from South Sudan in Kenya, and has worked in Nigeria and Pakistan.

But while Au - who has also helped train many young doctors and health-care workers - is used to working in conflict zones, this time he consulted his son, who is in his second year studying engineering at university.

His son assured him that it was right to go, and so he left for Gaza. He was based for several weeks at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis city, southern Gaza, which faced severe shelling from the Israelis.

"At first, I couldn't differentiate between the sound of the shelling coming from one direction and the rockets going in the other," Au said. "But after a while, I learnt to tell which was which."