The City Hospital, or Underground Treatment

Voices of Ukraine

Maryana Pyetsukh
11.02.2014 Ukrayinska Pravda
Translated by Maria Stanislav
Source: http://life.pravda.com.ua/society/2014/02/11/151963/

“Hospitals in Lviv are ready to receive the people injured at the Kyiv Maidan.” That statement, made by the Lviv City Head Andriy Sadoviy on January 20, sounded unusual at first. At the time, no one expected that the flood of injuries would be this overwhelming, that Kyiv hospitals wouldn’t be able to handle the load, that people would travel 500 kilometers to get treatment.

Medical staff of the People’s Hospital, Euromaidan.
Photo by Yuliya Kochetova

Mr. Sadoviy explained the motive behind his statement – Lviv hospitals offered more safety than the ones in Kyiv. The very next day, the importance of this factor became crystal clear.

On the night of January 21, unidentified men kidnapped the activist Ihor Lutsenko, together with an injured Lviv resident Yuriy Verbytsky. Soon after that, numerous reports came rolling in, about…

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Physicians at Maidan

Vika Yasynska, a photographer from Kyiv, met with people representing the medical profession at Maidan. They are from all over Ukraine, with different fates, united with a common purpose and the confidence that they will remain here as long as takes… “till the end… or till the beginning (?)”

 Every doctor or a volunteer has his own story… And every such story feels like sharing.

Medics of Euromaidan: An ideal health care system has been created here

Bribes are not taken here and no one demands that you bring your own bandages. Doctors volunteering on Maidan have organized a health care system that is impossible to find in state hospitals. Mornings are spent attending lectures; evenings and weekends – taking shifts in the medical tent on Maidan where first aid is given to the activists.  A second-year student of the National Medical University named after Bohomolets has been living on this schedule for two months. He says he is tired because of all the sleepless nights, exams and the frost. However, he’s not going to quit what he has started. He assists a doctor who takes care of patients in a tent on Maidan, bandages the injured and takes shifts on the barricades at Hrushevskiy street together with other medical colleagues. He says during this time he has had to provide aid for people with critically high fever, extremely high blood pressure and serious injuries.  All of this has however assured him that he has chosen the right and the needed profession. He says this has been an amazing experience.

A hospital wrought by Maidan’s hands

For activists and simple citizens, it took little more than a week to equip Euromaidan hospitals completely from scratch at the regional hospitals’ level. Defibrillators, surgical lightings, electrocardiographs, pulse oximeters, oxygen plant, medical ventilator, stretchers, UFO heaters, and over 100 medicine items appeared due to #PeoplesHospital (#NarodnyiHospital) project. INSIDER talked to the activists and found out how they finally made it.