Durban - South African aid organisation Gift of the Givers was planning to send more than 50 medical and search and rescue personnel to Nepal on Monday.
The group would travel to the country in a private chartered plane as airports had been closed to incoming commercial flights.
Spokesman Imtiaz Sooliman said the group would help Nepalese authorities rescue as many survivors as possible, but would also assist in other operations as needed.
“A highly qualified team of 20 trauma specialists are also on standby. These include general, orthopaedic and maxillo-facial surgeons with anaesthetists, emergency medicine intensivists, theatre and ICU nurses, paramedics and orthopaedic assistants,” he said.
Overwhelmed doctors moved hundreds of patients into the streets of Nepal’s capital on Sunday when aftershocks rattled hospitals and buildings already damaged by an earthquake believed to have killed more than 2 500 people and to have devastated Kathmandu valley.
Sick and wounded people lay in a dusty road outside Kathmandu Medical College while hospital workers carried more patients out of the building on stretchers and sacks.
Doctors set up an operating theatre inside a tent and rushed in the most critical, after a particularly big tremor.
The aftershock, itself a strong 6.7 quake, triggered more avalanches in the Himalayas after Saturday’s 7.9 quake, which was the strongest since 1934 when 8 500 people were killed.
Outside the National Trauma Centre in Kathmandu, patients in wheelchairs who had been under treatment before the earthquake joined hundreds of injured with fractured and bloody limbs, who lay inside tents made from hospital sheets.
“We only have one operation theatre here. To be able to provide immediate treatment we require 15 theatres. I am just not able to cope,” said Dipendra Pandey, an orthopaedic surgeon, adding he had done 36 critical operations since Saturday.
“Both private and government hospitals have run out of space and are treating patients outside,” said Nepal’s envoy to India, Deep Kumar Upadhyay.
Neighbouring countries sent in military transport planes laden with supplies. But little sign of organised relief efforts was visible as aid agencies struggled to fly helicopters in cloudy weather, aftershocks forced the intermittent closure of Kathmandu airport and roads were blocked by landslides.
The Mercury