ACCIDENT and emergency staff in Glasgow are still distraught after a close colleague lost her fiance in the Clutha tragedy.

As medics across the city's casualty departments were dealing with one of Scotland's biggest ever trauma incidents, it emerged one of their own had been directly affected.

Dr Lucy Thomas, 42, an A&E doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, was the fiancee of helicopter pilot David Traill, who died in the tragedy.

Dr Thomas also works for the Emergency Medical

Retrieval Service (EMRS), a team which would have been helping stabilise casualties at the scene of the crash, athough she is not thought to have been working that evening.

For ambulance staff, who worked alongside both the pilot and his fiancee, the events of that night are still raw.

An NHS source said: "A&E is a very small world, everyone knows each other and it's the same with the ambulance service. It is all still very raw for staff, they are still traumatised.

"To this day, they are not able to talk about it, they are still hurting.

"Not only did they know Lucy but they also knew David. Some of them were very good friends.

"When it's one of your own, it's a lot more poignant."

Grant Archibald, Chief Operating Officer of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, told how staff went above and beyond the call of duty that night to help those who were injured.

He said: "One of the remarkable and very Glasgow things was that lots of staff came to the hospitals and volunteered to help us.

"It was a tragedy but it brought out the best in all the emergency services.

"Remember, it was a Friday night, people would have been busy and out and about, yet many came back in. That impressed on me that whole 'team working' ethos that you get in the emergency services."

Grant was called at home and made his way to the Victoria Infirmary, while other staff went to the

Royal, the Southern and the Western Infimary.

Other casualties, not connected with the incident, were diverted to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley.

Grant said: "We have

developed major incident plans, which one always hopes never have to be put into place, but when events such as this occur, those plans go into action and work well in a co-ordinated way with the other services.

"That absolutely was

the case on that night, in tragic and remarkable circumstances.

"There were a series of responses.

"The first thing is that a medical and nursing team were sent to the site itself, as an outreach from the hospitals.

"Then, the rest of the hospitals put in major incident procedures. We knew the types of injuries we would be seeing.

"I've had experience of that, I worked at the time of the Bellgrove train crash, when two commuter trains crashed, killing the driver and one passenger and

injuring others.

"The Royal Infirmary was identified as the first receiving site, then the

Victoria and the Western.

"Through the night,

patients were triaged and assessed at the site of the Clutha and directed by

ambulance services.

"There, people are highly trained professionals who manage patients in a very focussed and caring way and that's what I saw at the Victoria and the Western and the Royal.

"There were patients who were in hospital for a considerable time.

"I was impressed, given that this was such a remarkable incident, by the level of co-ordination between the ambulance staff, the fire services and ourselves.

"Clearly our thoughts are still with the family and friends of people who died and those who were badly injured."

HOW do survivors, witnesses and the bereaved cope in the aftermath of a traumatic event like the Clutha?

Even the emergency services would have been unprepared for what they saw, according to Paddy O'Donnell, Professor of Psychology University of Glasgow

He said: "In the Lockerbie disaster, the police and ambulance staff hadn't before seen the results of people falling 30,000ft from the sky.

"The Clutha is a minor replica of that.

"Occasionally things happen so quickly you don't have time to take in what has happened.

"It's the intense emotional experience that leads to the long-term effects, which can result in post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

"Even if you don't get PTSD, the consequences of the event may gradually sink in and you are more likely to suffer a depressive episode, when you realise what's happened.

"Anniversaries have major effects on people, they can trigger memories of the accident connected to what you were doing at the time, noises and smells associated with it. Smells are very evocative.

"The emergency services would also be affected.

"The thing that seems to work for bereavement is normalisation - 'it has happened but I'm not going to think about it all day'.

"It's called 'directed forgetting'.

"Sudden loss is difficult to cope with. If you have a death coming up, you made anticipatory adjustments.

"Some people think about this as a life narrative. If you know a loved one is going to die you have got time to re-think the narrative.

"A sudden death breaks you off and you have to adjust the narrative.

"Most people suffer anxiety, which can die down within a few weeks but for others it seems to last much longer.

"Once it has lasted for eight to ten months, it's very difficult to shift. There are treatments that are useful, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

"Trauma focussed Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) uses the process of 'reliving' and 're-experiencing' the events and associated emotions of the traumatic incident in detail.

"This 'reliving' allows the person to gradually desensitise to the trauma

and learn to relocate it in the past

rather that living through it repeatedly as a live event."