Two years ago, on the 28th of February – four days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine – a UK-Med team was sent to assess how we could best support those in need. From Poland, the team crossed the border into Ukraine, marking the beginning of our emergency response. Two years later, we’re still there.
Working alongside a local partner, PCPM; a Polish emergency medical NGO which established a cross-border corridor into Ukraine, the UK-Med team travelled to Western Ukraine on the 4th of March 2022. Their aim was to plan an emergency medical intervention to provide lifesaving care for the sick and injured, as the frontline encroached ever farther west and the number of displaced people began to grow.
What started as a small advance team venturing into Ukraine at the start of the war would expand to become our biggest response to date and UK-Med’s first country programme. 50 staff, most of them Ukrainian, now work tirelessly to sustain our medical programmes in the country, which range from mobile health clinics to surgical support, to training and capacity building.
“My first 24 hours [in Ukraine] were spent on a train heading to Dnipro,” said Lizzi Marmont, Senior Operations Manager, and former Country Director for Ukraine, who was one of the first team members to reach Ukraine after the invasion in March 2022. “It was surreal: all the displaced people, children travelling alone, lots of emotional scenes as families who were being torn apart said goodbye to each other.”
“But within a week we’d arranged to hire trucks for mobile clinics, had a team of medics on the ground, and had identified 20 locations in need of our medical services. I could not have been prouder, particularly as we were dealing with blackouts, -20˚C temperatures, water supply cut-offs, and constant missile attacks. Over the first year we worked incredibly hard to build our programme, delivering a range of services in locations from west to eastern Ukraine.”
By the end of March, the UK-Med team in Ukraine had grown to 18, including six NHS doctors and nurses from our roster of emergency healthcare specialists. From there, we began to hire national Ukrainian staff to ensure a more sustainable, long term humanitarian response rooted in the communities we sought to serve, but with the support of UK-Med’s global roster of clinicians.
Dr. Latif, an NHS doctor from North Staffordshire who deployed in the early stages of UK-Med’s response, said at the time: “Whenever there’s conflicts in various parts of the world, as a human being it always affects you very deeply, seeing innocent people being bombed and traumatised by something that’s no fault of their own. You feel you want to reach out and help them in whatever way you can, and for me that’s utilising my medical skills.”
From small beginnings to our first country programme
Being an Emergency Medical Team verified by the World Health Organization (WHO), UK-Med is often at the frontline of conflicts and disasters where our medics are desperately needed. Often, this involves deploying small and highly trained teams of specialist medics for short periods at a time. However, in prolonged humanitarian crises where long-term support is required, we can scale up our responses to meet the needs of affected people.
“We’re an agile organisation, and that means having the right people for the job. We can deploy specialist burns teams, clinicians who are experts in rehabilitation, medics trained in the management of infectious disease outbreaks, and surgeons whose skills have been honed through years of experience in the operating theatre.” said Lizzi Marmont.
“But sometimes, the health needs are so complex that it calls for a larger response comprising different health interventions. In these instances, we can scale up our operations accordingly, as we did in Ukraine. Being an active conflict zone, there has clearly been a need for surgical support. But so too is there a need for psychological counselling, rehabilitation, and primary care, among other things.
“UK-Med’s strength in this sense is our ability to employ all of these modalities in an integrated and coordinated way. At the same time as we have international surgeons supporting Ukrainian doctors in hospitals, for example, we have mobile clinics bringing GP-level medical care and psychological counselling to hard-to-reach areas.”
To this end, funds raised through our public appeals help us enormously. They allow us the flexibility to adapt our responses and quickly expand our medical programmes as needed. Within the first two months of launching our Ukraine appeal, our donors gifted nearly £300,000 to support our lifesaving work – an enormous outpour of support that helped strengthen our health response.
Our country programme in Ukraine is a response built arm in arm with our supporters. The donations UK-Med received in the first few months proved critical, and our supporters have been with us every step of the way on the journey that has built our first country programme and our largest humanitarian response to date.
Strengthening Ukraine’s health system over time
From modest beginnings, UK-Med’s Ukraine programme has reached thousands. Through our Primary Health Care Programme (PHC), we’ve delivered more than 20,000 medical consultations since April 2022, many of them in areas close to the front line. 43% of people we’ve reached through these consultations have been displaced at least once.
During the same time period, we provided 9,333 mental health consultations – recognising the huge need for psychological assistance for people in a war zone who are impacted by trauma. Working alongside Ukrainian medical teams, we’ve also conducted 515 surgeries, 96% of which were for trauma-related wounds.
As well as treating the injured and ill directly, UK-Med also helped to strengthen Ukraine’s health system, which became strained and overstretched under the onerous demands of the conflict following the invasion. For medics who have deployed multiple times to Ukraine, seeing the way UK-Med’s training and capacity building has benefitted the country’s health system over time is inspiring.
“I’ve visited Ukraine three times – it already had an extremely efficient health service, but any country would struggle under the burden imposed by war, but any country would struggle under the burden imposed by war, and Ukrainian doctors had little training in the injuries caused by conflict trauma, which is what we were specifically sent in to provide.” said Dr. Shehan Hettiaratchy, Consultant Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon and UK-Med roster member.
“It’s been extraordinary to see the extent to which the Ukrainian teams have taken what we’ve been able to teach them and expand it so much more. We know they’ve been able to treat roughly 600 patients, as well as share their knowledge with others. Meaning that from a relatively small start point, UK-Med has helped create a web of training that will ultimately benefit thousands.”
Since April 2022, UK-Med has trained 12,300 people on topics including first aid and trauma care, basic and advanced life support, and how to handle mass casualty incidents. For Ukrainian surgeons in particular, UK-med has provided nearly 500 formal and on-the-job trainings, bolstering surgeons’ knowledge of wound care, limb reconstruction, rehabilitation, and more.
Compared to the team that first drove across the Ukrainian border nearly two years ago, UK-Med’s Ukraine response has grown to a full country programme capable of reaching tens of thousands of people with much needed medical care. The support of our donors has made this possible, and to that end, we will soon be relaunching our Ukraine appeal to support our Ukrainian colleagues’ lifesaving work.
We first entered Ukraine to respond to emergency health needs as a result of the full scale invasion. Two years later, that war is still ongoing, and the need for emergency healthcare continues.
“Of course, what we really want is for there to be no need for our services in Ukraine,” said Lizzi Marmont, “But what I would say to all of our patients, all of our Ukrainian colleagues, medics, and supporters, is that as long as we’re needed, we’ll be here.”
If you want to support our work in Ukraine, please donate today.
