POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) – In wheelchairs and stretchers, in ambulances and on the railroad tracks, they are waiting. Health care workers removed the ramps and took patients on a specially equipped train that would take them west. Far from intense fighting in eastern Ukraine.
The train, operated by Doctors Without Borders (Doctors Without Borders), was crowded with hospitals near the Ukrainian front line struggling to cope with the influx of war wounded, as well as the usual flow of the sick. Patients.
“The capacity of the hospital in the east has been under pressure since the start of the war,” said Yasser Kamaledin, MSF’s emergency coordinator for a medical evacuation train that includes the intensive care unit.
“The idea of this activity is to help the hospitals closest to the front line maintain bed capacity so they can receive more patients from seizures, conflicts, but also other chronic patients. , ”Kamaledin said.
Since it started operating on March 31, the train has taken nearly 600 people to hospitals in safer areas in western Ukraine, he said, including 30 others on Sunday.
Among them is Mykola Pastukhi, 40 years old. On Saturday he was wounded by a mortar round near Sivierododetsk that landed as he tried to move humanitarian aid to a city under heavy attack as Russian forces intensified efforts to seize Ukrainian territory. to the east.
There was still debris inside him, he said as he stood on the train platform and slipped his right arm under his shirt. He needed surgery, but the Lisichansk hospital near the city of Siyevierodonetsk, which is also under intense Russian attack, did not arrive. So he was evacuated to Lviv for an operation in western Ukraine.
There are other regular evacuation trains heading west and where the elderly and sick will board, but the MSF train is specially equipped for patient care.
Harassment in hospitals in eastern Ukraine was more visible after the attack, as the injured followed one after another.
Last week, doctors rushed a patient with a severe head injury to a hospital in the city of Pokrovsky when doctors cut off patients injured in the fall of two rockets.
Only a few were injured. But the hospital is tense. He worked with nearly half the staff he had before, working against the backdrop of sandbags piled on the windowsills.
Before the war, “when it was a normal job, we had 10 surgeons, now we have five,” said doctor Ivan Mozhaev. The 32-year-old is the only surgeon left in his ward of the five.
Since then a radical change in the nature of their work Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 Added an additional workload for doctors and nurses staying in hospitals near the battlefield.
“We used to treat the sick, sometimes with wounds. “Now we need to treat people with gunshot wounds,” Drs. Victor Krikli, head of operations at the hospital in the eastern city of Kramatorsk.
The city itself was also attacked, including on April 8, when a rocket hit the Kramatorsk train station, killing more than 50 people and injuring more than 100.
Many doctors left and the hospital had to close some wards, but still needed to be treated in and out of the city. The hospital’s cricket department has two surgical departments, each with 15 surgeons. Now there are only six left for the two of us. This was also true for nurses, where wards employed about half the staff before the war.
The Kramatorsk hospital in the Donetsk region of Ukraine is already facing war wounds. The region, along with nearby Lugansk, is part of the Donbas, where Russian -backed separatists began fighting Ukrainian forces in 2014 and have controlled parts of eastern Ukraine since then.
Krikli underwent surgery on the wound, “but the scale from time to time is not comparable,” he said. In 2014, they were soldiers, but this was the first time Kramatorsk medical personnel had seen so many wounded civilians.
“We could not have dreamed, even in the worst nightmares, that civilians in Ukraine would suffer such injuries,” he said, adding that the operation was performed on small children whose feet were exploded by the explosion. .
Despite the risk and physical and emotional loss of employment under such conditions, Kriklia will not leave.
“We are surgeons. Our job is to run and heal people. If everyone leaves, who will do the work? “he said.” Nobody says we’re a suicide squad or we’re looking for a way to die somewhere. But we’re doing our job. And we’re going to keep it going. “
Source: Huffpost
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.