Britain’s senior most and respected Consultant Paediatrician, Prof Abdul Rashid Gatrad, OBE, has earned respect and recognition by serving the Pakistani children faced with cleft lip and cleft palate and foot problems. He has set up a state-of-the-art fully operational cleft hospital and foot-and-cleft centre in Gujrat.
Besides, he has also set up with the help of his colleagues and philanthropists breast care service for women and an artificial limb fitting centre.
As CEO of Midland International Trust (MIAT), Prof Abdul Rashid Gatrad has raised over £3 million for various health-related development projects around the world. His cleft hospital is a project completed so professionally and was so impactful that ITV presented a 15-minute documentary on it. All services including operations are provided free, funded by mainly Muslim and Pakistani donors in the West Midlands.
Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health at three universities – University of Birmingham, Universities of Kentucky and Wolverhampton – he was awarded with the OBE from the Queen in 2002 for services to ethnic minority children in the Midlands. In 2014 he was made deputy Lieutenant to Her Majesty the Queen for his services. In the same year he was made Freeman of the Borough of Walsall for halving the death rate in new-born babies and for his part in the research into the Hepatitis Vaccine that was subsequently rolled out globally.
Prof Abdul Rashid Gatrad, started as postman before becoming a doctor in 1971, largely financed through MIAT this- state of the art 3 storey hospital which houses, audiology, speech therapy, dental services 2 wards and 2 operating theatres. The hospital is supported by 4 doctors running round the clock operations and providing free medical aid to patients of the area, including those who travel from far and wide. The hospital grounds have playing facilities. Then it was in 2016 when during a visit to Gujrat that he met a female teenage street beggar on crutches. She had clubbed feet that were bare and bleeding. This led Dr Rashid Gatrad to setting up the clubfoot centre where now hundreds of kids are being treated from birth – avoiding operations when older.
He said: “Over the last 15 years, in addition to the cleft and club foot centres we have set up in Pakistan breast care service for women, an artificial limb fitting centre, which houses the club foot centre named after my father Mahomed Gatrad, cataract camps, hearing services for the new-born, dental services and an outreach clinic for elderly and pregnant women in Sooklan Gujrat.
The doctor explained that through MIAT projects, he has arranged over 5000 cataract operations in Pakistan, Kashmir and Malawi; delivered over 500 cataract operations in Bangladesh; carried out 40 operations in Sierra Leone on teenage girls with vaginal fistula; delivered food provisions, fresh water and blankets to refugees in Syria, Jordon, Kenya and Lebanon; built a 3Km fresh water pipeline in a village in Somalia; built houses in Malawi in Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan after the floods and supported vocational training projects in Sierra Leone, Malawi, Turkey, India, Kashmir and Pakistan.
He added: “over the last 10 years I have been providing two ‘Gatrad Bursaries’ per year to doctors and nurses who travel abroad to train and teach.” Prof Abdul Rashid Gatrad regularly travels to Gujrat to train and teach nurses in the care of new-born babies. He has trained more than 1200 nurses over the last 15 years and some of the nurses he trained now work in England and Europe in the medical profession.
At 78 he is still full of enthusiasm to make a difference to the lives of the needy.
