This week 22 Canadian surgeons are going to operate, together with their Ukrainian colleagues, on 40 patients. They will perform surgery to correct deformities of the face, hands, arms, the skull, soft tissues, and to remove scars. The Canadian specialists will work in three-table operating rooms at the Central Military Clinical Hospital. This is the third time a Canadian mission visits Ukraine. During the first and second visits, surgeons performed 90 operations on servicemen and those injured on the Maidan.
This charitable project was launched by the Canada Ukraine Foundation. Canada’s government has allocated 1.2 million Canadian dollars for this purpose. “It is unique that a Canadian-Ukrainian institution has been given so much money. Amounts like this are usually granted to international nongovernmental organizations,” says Victor Hetmanczuk, president of the Canada Ukraine Foundation. Thanks to this aid, the Canadians will be able to leave the 700,000-dollar-worth equipment at the Kyiv hospital.
The patients were brought here from the military and civilian hospitals of Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, etc. “For our specialists, this project is a major master class in maxillofacial surgery, for we do not perform some types of operations,” says Colonel (Medical) Ihor Fedirko, chief of the maxillofacial and dental clinic of the Central Military Clinical Hospital. “Most of the patients we have chosen for the projects have already been operated on by Ukrainian doctors. Kyiv’s maxillofacial surgeons are quite good specialists, and the patients have undergone two or three basic reconstructive operations. The wounded will pass the next stage this week. It is, among other things, osteoplasty of the deformities of the lower and upper jaws, which the soldiers got as a result of landmine-explosion wounds.”
The Canadian medics are planning a fourth visit to Kyiv in February 2016. But this project is not the only initiative of the Canada Ukraine Foundation in Ukraine. “We have organized eight visits of ATO soldiers’ widows and orphans to the Carpathians so that they might revert to normal life. We train nurses at a Ternopil hospital to tend posttraumatic syndrome patients. We have also designed a cell phone attachment – if one is stressed out, he can find answers to 17 questions and assess his psychological condition. We are now pondering on how to reintegrate into society the guys who are coming back from war. Our projects may seem to be small, but they are strategic. By the end of our fourth medical mission, we will have operated on several hundred patients. We will leave the infrastructure at the hospital, and we have already transferred our expertise to Ukrainian surgeons – from now on, they will operate the way their Canadian colleagues do,” Hetmanczuk says.
