Miracles of war: how front-line injuries inform modern medicine

One reason for this is that they're incredibly well set up. Another is that the surgery being practised is genuinely pioneering. I was there for a couple of weeks earlier this year and in that time watched dozens of badly wounded people (and a couple of bomb-sniffer dogs) being treated.

Gunshot wounds, bodies cut to pieces by shrapnel, burns and numerous amputations caused by IEDs (improvised explosive devices) were a regular occurrence.

War has always driven innovation in medicine and science. And some of the techniques applied in the heat and dust of southern Afghanistan are finding their way back to the UK, where they're both saving and improving lives.

One of the most surprising developments, at least to me, was the use of amniotic membrane to treat eye wounds. Many seriously wounded soldiers suffer eye injuries and a few years ago such casualties had little chance of regaining their vision.

But at the hospital in Birmingham to which all military casualties are returned, they're now being treated using amniotic membrane, the innermost layer of the placenta that comes out after a baby is delivered.

Once stitched onto a damaged eye, it not only helps the cornea to heal, but it has anti-inflammatory properties and is immunogenic, which means the eye doesn't reject it. No one really knows how it works, but amniotic membrane is also increasingly used to treat civilian eye injuries.

Even something as straightforward as a new type of tourniquet, developed for use on the battlefield, has made a huge difference to survival rates. "There's five litres of blood in the human body and if a limb gets blown off by an IED, it can be gone in three to four minutes. It's all about teaching the guys how to react," instructor Sergeant Lee Melvin told me.

That tourniquet has since been picked up by, among others, the South West Ambulance Service Trust - where it's already been successfully used in life-and-death emergencies.

The big difference between Camp Bastion and any NHS hospital I've worked in is not just the speed at which everything happens but the aggressive use of blood products. Loss of blood is a major cause of death on the battlefield and responsible for 40 per cent of trauma deaths in the UK.

Applying a tourniquet may keep alive someone who has had their leg blown off, but they'll need the blood they've lost replacing, fast. Doctors used to give mainly fluid and red blood cells (which carry oxygen) to try and keep blood pressure up and oxygen travelling to vital organs. The problem was that however much fluid you put in the casualty would go on bleeding, often to the point of collapse and death.

In Bastion, as well as red cells, they also give plasma, a yellowy fluid you get from blood, which is rich in clotting agents. In Iraq, the American military discovered that if they gave one unit of red cells to one of plasma they could almost halve the death rate, and that's the ratio used by British military medics.

Five NHS casualty departments are also now trialling this approach.

Over a period of months I got access to a range of military-funded research both here and in the USA - from trials where they replace trauma patients' blood with ice-cold saline, to brain controlled prosthetics and face transplants.

The cost of this war, for civilians and military, has been exceptionally high. But I do believe some good will come out of so much suffering, and that because of what we've learnt, future lives will be saved.

Frontline Medicine is on tonight at 9pm on BBC2.